ietf-nntp <0> and message IDs

[Charles Lindsey]

In <m34r5ah29o.fsf at merlin.emma.line.org> Matthias Andree <matthias.andree at gmx.de> writes:

>I find this contradictory and unhelpful. If the server must synthesize a
>message-ID, IMO it must also record the message-id in the article --
>otherwise, forwarding an article without Message-ID header to a
>different host _may_ generate a flood duplicates with various Message-ID
>headers that Usenet will never be able to get rid of, because cancelling
>(which acts by Message-ID as well, which is non-constant in this case)
>will essentially be impossible. This effectively voids the uniqueness
>requirement of RFC-1036.

Not so. The message-id can "accompany" the article, in an accompanying
"envelope" if you like. I suspect that implementations of IHAVE, for
example, don't look inside the article to find the message-id - they will
already have it stored in some list of articles queued to go to some
particular host, and if they then want to transmit the full article, they
will use the history file to locate it. Yes, in a Netnews system, the
Message-ID in the article you send had better be the same as you say you are
sending, but I doubt servers have the time to check it is so.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5