Aye aye mark! Fit like?
 In a message of 08 Dec 96 mark lewis wrote to Mats Wallin:

 ml> unless i've missed something, programs that attempt to parse the local
 ml> part of the MSGID may (more likely will) break because they are
 ml> expecting just an address and not any additional, whether unique or
 ml> not, data...

Define an 'address'. ifmail and other tossers have been putting internet
addresses in there for ages!

The address can be fido, inet, street address - as long as it is a unique
return address for your system. There for it must be processed as text, and
thus changing its use to a purely unique value *shouldn't* break any
software.

^AMSGID: unique-string abcd3412
         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^------- 8 digit hex
         |
         \ eg "12dec1996-182512-2:259/7.0-1234-1234567"
               ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^^^
               |         |      |         |    |
               \ date    \ time \ address \ pid\ anything else
                                                 to make it unique

Would still be a valid MSGID. However shuch a verbose example would not be
required on most systems, the processid is only useful if more than one
program is creating messages, the "anything else" would normally
be vcovered by the date... No fixed spec for the string would be required
as long as the result was unique.

-- Lee Kindness
 lkindness{at}csl.co.uk http://www.scms.rgu.ac.uk/students/cs_yr94/lk

--- Spot 1.3a #1473