On Thu, Apr 11, 2024 at 01:13:52PM +1000, raf via Mutt-users wrote: > > > Question, what should I write in .muttrc to make my outgoing > > > mails have the same beautiful message-ID as Yandex mail?
> > The unfathomable thing about this question is why you (or anyone) > > should care in the slightest what your message ID looks like. > > It's an esoteric detail about e-mail transfer, the specific > > contents of which have no value to users, who in most cases won't > > even ever see the message ID, since most mail clients hide that > > detail from you by default. You have no practical reason to care > > what it is as long as everything is working correctly. It's > > literally not for you--it's for your MUA software. > The link to a kernel mailing list message that was provided earlier > in this discussion said that the choice to use base64 results in the > possibility of / characters being included in the message id which > causes problems for their archived messages accessible via a web > browser. So it seems that there is a reason to care about this. I believe it has to be a *syntactically* valid email address, according to the RFC. So, for example, an all-alphabetical random string would fail, because it'd lack a "@". > Although one could argue that the mailing list archiving system > should accept the responsibility of munging message ids to suit its > own needs. I've certainly seen mailing list archives on the web that > did munge the message id (but to replace @ characters, I think). I myself see not much wrong with a mailing list doing that, but: - others seem to feel differently, that modifying the msgid once a valid one has been generated by a MUA is gauche. And I understand that it makes some things slightly harder, especially if you use fcc or similar feature in other MUAs. - if the mailing list does mess with msgid, it absolutely must do it consistently for all copies of the message. Not like the mailman managed GNU lists where the msgid was (or still is?) munged if and only if the message was crossing a mail / news boundary. I stopped following the GNU lists because of that and I never went back. -- Ian
