On Sun, 31 Aug 1997 14:54:07 +0000, "Tomas Karlsson"
<webmaster(_at_)iimagers(_dot_)com> wrote:
Is there a ways to check if the message-id header line begins with
Message-ID: <1997
Trivial to do, but, if you don't mind me saying so, stupid.
Here are the first characters from some valid messages' Id:s:
$ sed -n 's/^Message-Id: <\(....\).*/\1/p' Mail/[^s]* | \
sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | pr -bt -5
735 1997 4 UPMA 3 3407 1 wouq 1 97Se
70 1996 4 1995 2 v021 1 s3e9 1 95Xu
28 3.0. 3 v030 2 m0wx 1 ng1t 1 7R7u
15 Pine 3 m0x0 2 m0wt 1 m0x1 1 2909
11 v015 3 m0wV 2 luis 1 m0ww 1 23Vm
6 m0x3 3 H000 2 GW42 1 m0wS 1 2349
5 v031 3 97Au 2 7129 1 i0wB 1 2.2.
4 m0x5 3 9703 2 6553 1 g4Ls
Just for comparison, here's a smaller sample, from spam messages:
$ sed -n 's/^Message-Id: <\(....\).*/\1/p' \
Mail/spam scratch/inbox/spam-filtered* | \
sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | pr -bt -5
38 1997 1 mail 1 4314 1 2025 1 1495
2 3.0. 1 7806 1 3083
Doesn't look to me like a particularly good criterion. As a general
comment, the Message-Id will depend on what mail software people used
to send the message; you could probably find some good regular
expressions which match only Message-Id:s generated by spam programs,
but this is not it. (That "3.0." looks a bit promising.)
/* era */
(The sample you posted didn't even have a 1997 message-id, was that
intentional?)
--
Paparazzis of the Net: No matter what you do to protect your privacy,
they'll hunt you down and spam you. <http://www.iki.fi/~era/spam/>