[Mailman-Developers] From the creation of a ThreadID

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 7:29 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry at list.org> wrote:
> On Apr 08, 2012, at 01:11 PM, Richard Wackerbarth wrote:
>
>>I would propose a slightly different scheme for converting messages to stable
>>URIs..
>>
>>If we create our ID by concatenation of some hash and a part of the date,
>>then the mail server need remember only those messages that fall in the same
>>date-sensitive part of the namespace. It can "forget" about ancient history.
>
> We had a very lengthy discussion about the hash a year or so ago, when the
> current algorithm was agreed upon.  I'm too swamped at the moment to dig up
> the links, but look for input from Jeff Breidenbach and Jeff Marshall.

I believe it's the thread including this message:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/email-sig/2012-January/000883.html

I don't really see the point of not storing all the IDs, anyway.  A
million message IDs isn't even going to take up a gigabyte! (I think
it's reasonable to reject a 1000-byte Message-ID as an attack, don't
you?)  Anybody who's running an archive that receives unique messages
in mega-message units presumably has enough resources that they can
afford the odd gigabyte (heck, even in RAM ;-) even if not all the
messages are going to be stored in the archive due to expiration
policies or whatever.