PGP: sequencing messages

[Trevor Smith]

On Wed, 5 Apr 2000 09:36:15 -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:

>    This one is The Bat!'s.  How it comes up with the number sequence is
>beyond me, really.  Needless to say that each MSGID from The Bat! is pretty
>much unique.  I mean the rpglink.com pretty much assures that any TB!'s
>running elsewhere will not match, even if the number sequence somehow is
>duplicated.  A few more from me:
>
>Message-ID: <1359.000405@rpglink.com>
>Message-ID: <6353.000405@rpglink.com>
>Message-ID: <12338.000405@rpglink.com>
>
>    Ah, the one after the . is the date (YYMMDD).

Don't you see the flaw in this? Suppose you were talking about a
POPULAR email client, such as Outlook Express or Eudora. The chances
of many people at the same domain using the client on the same day
are EXTREMELY good. Then you've only got 10,000 (or 100,000 in the
third example) possible combinations. Subscribers to att.net or
aol.com could probably guarantee a message ID would be duplicated at
this rate.

All this proves, I guess, is that leaving message ID assignment up to
email client developers runs the risk of them implementing a lame
algorithm.

But if that's what people want -- PMMail/2 to generate its own IDs
instead of leaving it for the server -- and if it's possible, I'll
pass it along to the wish list.

(But I still wouldn't call it a bug if an RFC specfically says that
the uniqueness is guaranteed by the server, not the client.)


-- 
 Trevor Smith          |          trevor@haligonian.com
 PGP public key available at: www.haligonian.com/trevor

PGP Public Key Fingerprint= A68C C4EC C163 5C0A 6CFA  671F 05D4 0B30 318B AFD6