--- Slepp Lukwai <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: 
> On Tue, 9 Oct 2001, Charles Cazabon wrote:
> 
> =>Slepp Lukwai <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> =>>
> =>> The base question after that comes to be, when tracking a message through
> =>> the queue for historical reasons, would using the inode number be a
> =>> realistic possibility for a unique identifier
> =>
> =>Inode number is guaranteed to be unique at any given instant.
> 
> So it will eventually be reused, and thereby over a year long period will
> more than likely be used many more times than once. Alright.
> 
> =>> or would the message ID be a more appropriate (while harder to find)
> =>> item to track?
> =>
> =>Message-IDs are only theoretically unique.  In practice, they collide
> =>all too often.
> 
> That's unfortunate.. Has anyone ever considered placing in an MTA
> Message-ID that can be more or less considered unique among all IDs? I
> figure this would be a trivial thing, but I wonder if it has practical
> application.

If you consider going to that much trouble, then you might as well
just post-process and combine the timestamp of the "new msg" entry.

e.g.

Oct  9 21:22:26 mail qmail: 1002658946.264686 new msg 147842

could generate a unique ID of

1002658946.264686.147842

or even (coz I dig hashes)

1002658946.264686 new msg 147842

NaN, I know, but they _are_ unique (unless there is a policy of
sending the clock back ;). Point is, there is already enough
information in the log to make a given entry unique.

Adam.

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