On 9/18/02, Greg Pierce said:

>It's not something you or any of your users should really see any
>effect from one way or another.

There actually is a reason for it, in spite of this.

If your server is hosting more than one host name, Conversant has no way of knowing which one to use for which conversation, when assigning these unique message ID's.

You can see the message ID's in the headers of every email sent from Conversant (including this one, if you are subscribed by email).

Here's an example: we have a box called "samson.free-conversant.com". That's the canonical name, but lots of other host names can also be used to refer to this machine, including (for example) truerwords.net.

Using this hostname-for-message-ids feature, I can have the message id's for truerwords look like this:

Conversant-45469@truerwords.net

instead of like this:

Conversant-45469@samson.free-conversant.com

or like this:

Conversant-45469@[192.168.0.17]

Greg's right, this isn't a big deal, but this was actually written in for Compaq (a couple years ago). They didn't want references to our hosting service showing up anywhere in their site or the messages it generates.

Seth