Re: [Nmh-workers] 1.3 release and Dcc/Bcc behaviour

[Joel Reicher]

>   | Perhaps you are making a point about the way nmh generates message-ids?
>   | Should the algorithm be smarter than it is for us to change the
>   | default with a clear conscience?
> 
> No, that's not it, the algorithm is fine (look at my message-id header,
> you'll see nothing there different from what nmh would generate, as that's
> what I use...).    That is, I have no objection at all to the -msgid
> option as it now is, only to applying it on hosts that aren't correctly
> configured to use it.
> 
> You might be right that it should be the site admin (site admin, these
> days, on someone's random home PC??) who should fix this, and know how to
> fix this, but I just don't see that happening - rather what I see is lots
> of other mail admins telling people they don't like MH users, because of
> the stupid message-ids they generate.

I find this point persuasive; we certainly don't want mail admins telling
users not to use nmh.

Nevertheless, I don't agree that the nmh algorithm is fine. On the
contrary, I think most of what you've said constitutes an argument in
favour of designing a better algorithm so that -msgid *can* become the
default.

Moreover, I expect that the developers of other MUAs have already
considered and solved this problem, and perhaps solved it well, especially
considering the number of MUAs that also double as newsreaders.

Consequently, when I find the time, I'm going to do a survey of what's
been done and said amongst other developers.

I don't want this to hold up the 1.3 release though, so I'm not going
to commit the changes I made for -msgid to be the default. Instead I'm
submitting a task on the Savannah task tracker and I'll work on it
for some post-1.3 release.

I've just finished going through all the patches and bugs on Savannah,
and have closed/applied all those (bar one) I think are very trivial. The
rest can wait until after 1.3.

If there's anything that belongs in CVS or the bug tracker before 1.3, put
it there soon!

Cheers,

        - Joel