Thu 2002-10-31 20:01, Jasen Betts (3:640/531.42) wrote to andrew clarke:

 ac>> FTS-9 MSGIDs are not unique enough to be accurately relied upon.

 > sure they are, FTS-9 says they don't reapeat for three years,

 > of course many implementations don't ensure that.

 > IMO what's needed is a proper implementation of FTS-9

 > eg using sequential numbers from a single source for all the messagids 
 > on the system.

 > At it simplest This means about 15 lines of C. (or pascal, bssic etc) 
 > in each program where they generate the message-ids, and a key file 
 > somewhere where all the mail processors can reach it,

Good in theory, but not going to work if you don't have the source code to
everything unfortunately.  I guess the good thing about this is that more
and more people are using open source FTN software, if not most of them, so
there may be hope yet!

It could be unreliable if the key file goes missing or gets corrupted (eg.
two programs trying to write to it at once) but is probably not such a bad
solution if you decide not to generate random numbers. Particularly if the
user can decide for themselves which method to use.

Although I still think a random number generator seeded with the year +
month + day + hour + minute + second + subsecond would do a pretty
reasonable job if the string to be generated was long enough.  I guess I
should do some tests.

In any case Charles Cruden's idea of basically allowing any unique string
seemed the most logical in hindsight.  You could then have a combination of
user-supplied-data + random number + MD5 of the message text, or any other
combination you wanted to use...

 > Maybe another kludge could be added to indicate the the msgid so 
 > generated is guaranteed to be unique.

May as well invent a new kludge that does both.  ;-)

 ac>> Implementations that generate a Message-ID may also optionally
 ac>> generate a MSGID conforming to the FTS-9 standard for systems that
 ac>> do not recognise the Message-ID.

 > is there going to be a replacemnt to the REPLY kludge too ?

Yep.

 > one solution to different applications generating matching msgids is to
 > give the different appications diffrerent addresses - eg give the news
 > autoposter a point address so it can't clash with the message editor.

Quite true, but not always practical.

-- mail{at}ozzmosis.com

--- Msged/NT 6.1.1