[Celeste] msgIDs and sharing categories

danielv at netvision.net.il danielv at netvision.net.il
Wed Oct 31 15:44:05 UTC 2001


While on the topic of MD5ing the message/header - please note that the
protocols involved do not in any way guarantee that the bits I send will
be the same bits you recieve - just that they'll have the same content.

Just look at your mails headers, raw, and you'll see it's so.

In fact, significant parts of the relevant RFCs deal with how different
(old) mail gateways might choose to garble your messages and how
compliant (new) clients and servers should protect themselves. A good
starting point is RFCs 2045-49, describing MIME.

So *maybe* MD5ing the contents, *after parsing and decoding* could work,
but that's pretty ugly.

Ummm, what was the application again?

*** Bijan said :
Thus, unless I'm confused or mistaken, I cannot share a categorization
of
a number of messages with someone else without sharing the particular
message file (or subset thereof).
***

Bijan, could you clarify what you're trying to do?

Daniel

Duane Maxwell <dmaxwell at san.rr.com> wrote:
> Tim Rowledge wrote:
> > Duane Maxwell wrote:
> > > What's wrong with using an MD5 hash of the entire message?  While
> collisions
> > > are possible, they're very unlikely.
> > Urk, how long would that take? What about one of those _really_ long
> > messages were some dipstick quotes an entire 100kb digest, adds a 250kb
> > code 'snippet' and dear ol'M$ s/w adds it all again in html plus one of
> > those '.vcf' thingies?
> 
> Well, just in case the Squeak MD5 code were too slow, somebody (who shall
> remain nameless) wrote a Slang version for an MD5 plugin, so it wouldn't
> really take all that long.  The computation would likely be small compared
> to the time to download the message in the first place.
> 
> > Would hashing the message's header be plausible?
> 
> Maybe.
> 
> > Is there any identifier that the pop/imap server one gets the message
> > from can be persuaded to provide?
> 
> AFAIK, there's nothing one can rely on.
> 
> -- Duane




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