Re: Mailing List Last Call for 2822 update internet-draft

On Thu, 26 Jul 2007, SM wrote:
> >In section 3.6.4, I suggest that we mention the idea that a software vendor
> >can use their domain name when generating message IDs.  For example, change
> >this:
> 
> I don't see a reason for this change.  Could you please elaborate on 
> why you are recommending this?

It has happened in the past that software vendors have created
message-id algorithms that did not guarantee unique message-ids in the
face of non-unique host names.  The common wisdom has been that it's
better to generate message-id's of the form <${something derived from
a random number, a timestamp, and the non-unique hostname}@${something
that encodes the software version}.${vendor's domain name}> than to
generate message-id's of the form <${anyhing}@${non-unique hostname}>.

The intent behind my suggested wording is to make it more clear to
software vendors that the domain name on the right hand side of the
message-id is allowed to be the vendor's domain name; that it doesn't
have to be the domain name of the host that's running the software, and
that inability to know the domain name of the host is not necessarily a
problem.

--apb (Alan Barrett)