[maildb-devel] A new issue

[Jeff S. <jsq...@os...>]

Here's a new issue that I thought of while I was driving home from
Bloomington today...

For my personal mail use, I recently switched over from client-side
filtering to server-side filtering (procmail).  In doing so, I learned
that the same message (i.e., a message with the same Message-Id) can
legitimately arrive at a single mailbox multiple times -- and possibly
even with different headers.

It's as simple as sending a message to two recipients: bo...@wo... and
bo...@ho....  Bob has his home address forwarded to work.  So Bob
actually gets two copies of the same message in his work mailbox, but
aside from some similarities (including an identical message ID, To, From,
Subject, Dates, etc.), the headers of the two messages may be very
different.  For example, the routes may be entirely different.  The
Subjects may be similar, but they may be different.

Consider an even worse case -- someone sends a virus to bo...@wo... and
som...@ex....  Bob's a member of somelist, so he gets two copies.
But the mailing list adds its own header lines and footer to the body.
So the message ID is the same, but for all intensive purposes, everything
else is different.

Can our current DB schema handle this?

I *think* it can -- it seems like we're using message ID + the unique
integer (msg_ids.m_id).  Does that make sense?

-- 
{+} Jeff Squyres
{+} jsq...@os...
{+} Research Associate, Open Systems Lab, Indiana University
{+} http://www.osl.iu.edu/