Re: Summary of Issues Raised to date

On Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 11:55:59AM +1300, David Harris wrote:
> Perhaps it would be appropriate to reiterate the primary goal of this 
> group, as defined on the ASRG web site:
> 
>     1: Investigate the requirements for a common header to be 
>     produced by filters (something like "Filtered-By"), so MUAs do 
>     not have to look for different types of headers
> 
> This seems like a very simple, achievable goal to me, but the recent 
> threads on this list seem to me to have lost sight of it. A lot of the 
> discussion going on at present seems to be in the form of ideas that 
> grow legs and rush off into the undergrowth to battle demons.

I'm certainly interested in pursuing the standard header idea,
and in fact I guess I too have only perked up when the focus has
been on that particular thing.  Unfortunately the three inertial
problems you mention are also applicable here.  There are a number
of popular filtering programs already flourishing that emit
scoring-like information that is used by other programs, and these
would be hard to change.  One possibility is to introduce new
official header definitions, and progress to a stage where each filter
program supports the new ones as well as its old ones.

 
> I hate to be the one who suggests a lowest-common-denominator 
> approach to a problem, but I really think that's what we need to be doing 
> here. Instead of trying to solve *all* the header-related problems we can 
> think of, why not start off with the simplest thing we think we might 
> actually be able to achieve and build on that?

I've thrown out a couple of things; I'm sure there are other ideas
out there.

But I would disagree that that's the end-all.  Headers are one thing,
and are useful in an asynchronous mode.  At some point there will
be more interesting things to talk about: like real-time communication
between filter programs and other agents (one that I am particularly
interested in is MTA/filter interaction).

mm