Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site brl-tgr.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!bellcore!decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!godot!harvard!seismo!brl-tgr!tgr!Jacob_Palme_QZ%QZCOM.MAILNET@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA From: Jacob_Palme_QZ%QZCOM.MAILNET@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA Newsgroups: net.mail.headers Subject: Checksum as a replacement for missing Message-ID. Message-ID: <9090@brl-tgr.ARPA> Date: Fri, 8-Mar-85 22:50:32 EST Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.9090 Posted: Fri Mar 8 22:50:32 1985 Date-Received: Mon, 11-Mar-85 06:44:53 EST Sender: news@brl-tgr.ARPA Lines: 19 The reason I choose not to treat the date field as a string, is that the checksum should not change if the date field is translated from one format to another, e.g. from the format in RFC822 to the format in X.400. This of course requires that the date field is parseable. But every single message should, when you get it, have a header in one given standard and thus date fields not belonging to this standard should not occur. One problem is the time zone. Since the format of this seems to be often wrong, I did not include it in the checksum. This means that if the time is translated to another time zone, e.g. if the date "25 Feb 85 15:01 EST" is translated by some agent handling the message into "25 Feb 85 12:01 PST" then the algorithm will create a different checksum. Question: Would such translations of dates by message handling agents be expected to occur?