Subject: Re: #1083 USEPRO 7.5: Rules for Generating message-ID

From: John Stanley <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 08:18:01 -0700 (PDT)

"Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>"Established custom" is how Usenet works, and it is not our job to change
>that. 

What a meaningless statement. We aren't talking about changing 
"established custom." The problem is that "established custom" is totally 
meaningless as a defining limit. 

>It exists; it works.

You say that is if you thought there were just one "established custom", 
and that the one "established custom" was the solution to all our 
problems. There are as many "established customs" on USENET are there are 
newsgroups, I would dare say; perhaps a few less based on the same person 
moderating more than one group. Ok, in the newsgroups I read, the 
established custom is that I can cancel anything I don't want to see. 
Established custom works. Fine business, OM.

>The text I quoted in is USEAGE, and has no normative effect.

It will be in "a standard" and people will quote that standard to justify 
their enforcement of "established custom". 

>>Is there a requirement for globally permanently unique or not? 

>There is, but there is no *mandated* method of achieving it (there is a
>REOMMENDED method).

That's not what we are talking about, either. Read what I quoted you 
writing:

]We are talking here of people who construct <msg-id>s which contain the
]names of other people's domains in their <id-right>. Assuming that they
]have taken care to choose an <id-left> such that the <msg-id> as a whole
]is still globally unique, they are not in breach of USEFOR; nothing will
]break as a result, hence they are not in breach of USEPRO.

If we care about "globally permanently unique", then saying what you just
did is contradictory. You cannot say that it is ok to use someone else's
domain name ("not in breach of USEFOR" and "not in breach of USEPRO") and
even hope for such a condition to exist. I gave just one example;  
[email-masked], given that example.com is not my domain, may be globally
unique today, but it will not be globally unique when someone at
example.com posts their next article.

>It is well known that generating <msg-id>s that can be predicted by the
>Bad Guys is poor practice,

Irrelevant. Either globally permanently unique is the goal, or it is not. 
If it is, then saying what you did is simply ludicrous.