From: John Stanley (stanley@peak.org)
Date: Sun Jul 07 2002 - 23:23:35 CDT
Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk):
New version:
.... All other headers defined in this standard (excluding
variant headers, but including specifically the Message-ID-header)
MUST be identical in both the posted and mailed versions of the
article, except that headers rendered in UTF-8 in the posted version
MAY be encoded according to [RFC 2047] in the emailed version.
No. Message ID, and by extension all headers that contain msg-id content,
MUST NOT be different. There is ONE message id for a message, not two, not
five.
There is absolutely no reason for encoding a message id. None at all. It
is intended to me machine readable, and it is intended that a simple
compare of octets be sufficient to identify the same ids. There is no
system that needs to generate an encoded message id, and no reason to
complicate the system in this regard.
In addition, to say that they MUST be identical except they may be
different is just loony. It's as if one is trying to redefine the
RFC-standardized meaning of MUST.