OT - EMEW (Enhanced Message-ID as Email Watermark) breaks pipermail threading

[Hugo van der Kooij]

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Mark Sapiro wrote:
> I notice a few frequent posters on this list, including Jules since
> late May, appear to receive list posts with Message-IDs munged with
> EMEW watermarks. Thus their replies to list posts have In-Reply-To:
> with the munged Message-ID which breaks threading in the pipermail
> archive at <http://lists.mailscanner.info/pipermail/mailscanner/>
> (every time Jules replies to a post, a new thread is started).

I was wondering why Jules replies always end up in the wrong place in a
thread.

> I am a Mailman developer and am concerned about what, if anything, I
> should do about this for the near term. My specific concerns are
> 
> 1. how wide spread is the use of EMEW likely to become.
> 
> 2. How do I recognize the added data in the Message-Id? It looks like
> the regexp 'EMEW-[0-9A-Za-z]{6}[0-9a-f]{32}-' will work and removing
> the match will restore the original Message-ID (or at least the
> immediately prior Message-ID). Is that a good regexp, or is there a
> better one?
> 
> 3. Are there products other than BarricadeMX that are munging
> Message-IDs in other ways for similar reasons.
> 
> I haven't been able to find much on the web about this. I would
> appreciate any advice or additional information anyone can point me to.

In my view anything that starts playing with message identifiers should
do so in manner that they do not break things. BarricadeMX should in
fact restore these message identifiers again on the outbound traffic.

Whatever changes are done on inbound traffic should be undone on
outbound traffic. RFC 2822 in fact makes this mandatory in section 3.6.4

So at this point anything mocking about and changing Message-ID's is not
RFC compliant and should be removed from the internet.

So there is no need to fix mailman. There is a mandatory need to fix
Barricade-MX and any other solution that breaks the RFC.

Hugo.

- --
hvdkooij at vanderkooij.org               http://hugo.vanderkooij.org/
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	A: Yes.
	>Q: Are you sure?
	>>A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
	>>>Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?

Bored? Click on http://spamornot.org/ and rate those images.

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