Re: [Evolution] Deleting duplicate emails

[HvR <hvrietsc myrealbox com>]

On Thu, 2003-08-21 at 08:56, guenther wrote:
> > run md5sum on the mail message body and store the resulting string in
> > a file then compare each message against this list in the file, if the
> > md5sums of the message body are the same then the message is
> > guaranteed to be the same.
>
> Nope.
>
> If the md5sum hashes are different, the messages are guaranteed to be
> different. If the hashes are the same, there is always a slight
> probability, that the messages are *NOT* the same.

true one in a multi billion chance.. so i will take my chances, after all the chance of getting a bit error on my hard disk are bigger then that, your solution with formail is much easier on the cpu, but the probability of email systems generating the same message-id header  are much much larger then a md5sum clash...

> With a limited length of hash value, you cannot guaranteed distinct
> longer data chunks.
>
>
> > > In some folder, for some reasons I have duplicate mails (same mail, two
> > > or three times).
>
> Vincent,
>
> I have posted a small hack (shell script using formail) to delete
> duplicate messages based on the Message-Id: header. Search the archive
> for it and read my notes carefully.
>
> As I got some feedback and it currently is not wise to run it more than
> once [1] I already planned to rewrite it and post it again. Silly me
> even sort of announced it without the time to code.
>
> This seems like a good possibility to actually rewrite it and release
> it...
>
> ...guenther