Re: No apologies if you receive this multiple times (was CFP: IEEE IC3N'2000)

[end2endinterest removed...not on topic for that discussion]

in general you don't want to do duplicate suppression based on
message-id alone, because sometimes the same message-id really
is used for significantly different messages  (sometimes due
to software bugs, but if duplicate supression were widespread
it would probably be a target of malice ... to keep someone from
seeing a message, send them a different message using the same
message-id).  some lists significantly modify messages without 
modifying the message-id.  (and you probably don't want them
to modify the message-id - it's what lets you trace a message 
back to its source)

you can use message-id to find potential duplicates, and then
compare the messages themselves and use heuristics to determine
whether they really are more-or-less the same.  or a user agent
could remove extraneous information (e.g. received headers) from 
every message it received, hash the result, and compare the hashes
for duplicates.   I don't know of any user agent that does either 
of these, and unless one gets lots of duplicate mail, it might
not be worth the bother.

mail delivery systems should probably not try to eliminate duplicates
on behalf of their users. sometimes you actually want to know that
you got a copy of the message that was sent through a list even if
you already received a copy by other means.  so the user agent would
need to do the duplicate suppression if it is to be done at all.

I don't think we need to find a technical solution to every 
social problem that exists with email.  the problem exists in other
fields as well - people sometimes get more than one copy of the
same mail-order catalog, for instance - and we don't lose too much
sleep over it.  

in general, the purpose of apologies are to avoid getting compliants
from people who are naive enough to think that this is the sender's
problem rather than the recipient's.

Keith

Received on Tuesday, 2 May 2000 12:35:06 UTC