Newsgroups: news.software.b Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: sites changing a message id Message-ID: <1991Jan12.234625.17232@zoo.toronto.edu> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: Date: Sat, 12 Jan 1991 23:46:25 GMT In article zeeff@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us (Jon Zeeff) writes: >Apparently various sites decided to change/add the message id on this >article making it look like it had been posted many times. Sounds >like antisocial behavior on the part of some software somewhere. Last time we ran into this, the diagnosis was messed-up headers in the original (which can happen as a result of using an old version of C News and posting an article whose early lines begin with white space, although the odd format of the second Message-ID line argues weakly against this) which caused B News not to see the Message-ID header... whereupon it adds one with a message-ID of its own invention. So the single messed-up original is rebroadcasted, under a new message-ID, by every B News site it hits. Ick. I'm not sure this entirely accounts for this case, since the new ID looks much more like a C News ID. That's curious, because C News definitely does *not* make up a message-ID to fill the gap. Old C Newses just passed on the article unmodified; new ones drop it on the floor. -- If the Space Shuttle was the answer, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology what was the question? | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry