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From: rees@pisa.citi.umich.edu (Jim Rees)
Subject: Re: Ideas for Message-ID's
Message-ID: <50a41197.1bc5b@pisa.citi.umich.edu>
Sender: usenet@terminator.cc.umich.edu (usenet news)
Reply-To: rees@citi.umich.edu (Jim Rees)
Organization: University of Michigan IFS Project
References: <3427@litchi.bbn.com> <1991Mar22.050749.22115@looking.on.ca> <b2x77c.9uo@wang.com>
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 91 21:24:14 GMT

In article <b2x77c.9uo@wang.com>, fitz@wang.com (Tom Fitzgerald) writes:

  The number of safe characters is way below 85 unfortunately.  But above
  36 it really doesn't do you a lot of good.  If you want to crunch 31 bits
  of timestamp and 15 bits of process ID into a string, it's easy to get a
  10-character result (like you'll see in the message ID of this article)
  and a pain to get any shorter than that.

Wait, I've got an idea.  How about numbering each article, starting with '1'
and going up.  You could keep a counter, say in a file in /usr/lib/news, and
increment it each time.  You could use decimal and not reach that 10
character limit until you posted 10 billion articles.