email message id

[cdevers at pobox.com (Chris Devers)]

On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, eric wrote:

> hi, i sent an email to myself and was slightly surprised to see the name
> of my computer listed.  (playPen1).
>
> Message-Id: <1065558318.18652.1.camel at playPen1>
>
> 1.  what do the numbers and "camel" mean?
> 2.  where is there a good explanation of what information is passed
> along with an email?  thanks for any hints.  eric.

The text of your Message-Id header depends on several variables, including
your machine's name and the mail software you're using.

A recent header of mine, for example, was

    Message-ID: <Pine.OSX.4.58.0310012243550.28473 at devers.homeip.net>

In my case, that indicated my mail client (Pine), operating system
(MacOSX), mail client version (4.58), and ...I'm not sure what the other
data is, it's semi-random after that (I think the last digits could be a
process ID, but the 03100... number is a mystery to me).

In your case, you're sending headers like this:

    > Message-Id: <1065559039.18652.9.camel at playPen1>
    > Mime-Version: 1.0
    > X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.2.2 (1.2.2-5)

So Evolution is determining what to put in that field, and it seems to be
using a format much different than what Pine uses.

It's a bit like User-Agent strings for web clients -- there's no real spec
for what has to be in there, so every client is more or less free to make
up whatever they'd like. The general format seems to be

  <arbitrary_text at host>

where the host part is fixed, and the arbitrary part is, well, arbitrary.


You may want to search Google for "ximian evolution message-id format" or
similar phrases. That or dig through the source files.

If you see this as a privacy issue, you may be able to mask some of that
info, but it wouldn't surprise me if some of the data fields are fixed at
compile time rather than something you can configure later. I'm not sure
through, I don't usually use graphical mail clients, including Evolution.



-- 
Chris Devers