David Bremner <david@tethera.net> writes:

> Alexander Adolf <alexander.adolf@condition-alpha.com> writes:
>
>> Bearing in mind that re-recognising a message which has arrived
>> multiple times via different routes is a worthwhile feature, it would
>> seem to me that a hash over the invariant part of the message, that is
>> the body, would allow for such detection. In that light, it would seem
>> to me that the tuple (body_hash, message_id) could be a candidate for
>> a “unique enough”(tm) identifier?
>
> I always had the impression that the message body had too variation
> imposed by different delivery routes for this to be very helpful:
> essentially the hash would be different for every file due to trailers
> added by mailing lists,

Ah, good point. I hadn't thought of mailing list trailers. Could these
perhaps be detected via the signature line separator "-- \n"?

I guess this also touches on the question of what a consensus definition
of "sameness" could be. If we take the message-id only, it'd be a purely
technical one. If we'd include the content one way or another (for
instance via hash over the body), that would rather be an editorial
definition of "sameness".

> re-encoding,

Like...? utf-8 to/from quoted-printable...?

> stupid "external message" headers added by malicious^Wcorporate mail
> servers, etc...

Headers would not "muddy the waters" since they are headers. In my mind,
the hash would be over the body only.

> I could be wrong, maybe hashing is a useful approach, but I'd need to
> see some numbers to be convinced.

I fully agree that we need to adapt to the realities of how things are
actually used, not how they were intended to be used.

How would I find instances of multiple files for the same message-id in
my database for example?


Cheers,

  --alexander
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