RE: [Off Topic] Need review for POP3 extension mechanism

I apologize for such a late response, but i have been out of the office for
the last few weeks.

I agree with the others who view this as being a useful draft, and second
the motion that it should go as proposed instead of informational or
experimental.

Although the list has not had a lot of dicussion on it, I know Randy has
been discussing this with various people at venues like the ietf, so it has
been getting review.  My biggest concern was the former LMOS setting allowed
for expiration settings to be based on the command used to acccess the msg,
which Randy has addressed with the new EXPIRE setting.

I do have one minor concern regarding the current wording of the EXPIRE
setting. 

The draft states:
"If the expiration policy might differ per user (that is, the EXPIRE
argument might change after authentication), the server MUST announce in the
AUTHENTICATION state the smallest value which might be used.  The server
should announce the more accurate value in the TRANSACTION state.

It is unclear to me whether the intent of this is to force the server to
keep track of the smallest setting a user currently has set, or if it is for
the server to annouce the smallest value that an administrator could
conceivably set for a particular user.  If the intent is the former, than
this will be problematic for servers that are not tightly coupled with their
directory, as it effectively forces the server to scan a list of all user
settings at each log on time. 

I'll talk to Randy to get clarification, and perhaps come up with some
clarification wording in regards to this.

Another minor nit is the wording:
"If the authentication step negotiates an integrity protection layer, the
client SHOULD reissue the CAPA command after authenticating to check for
active down-negotiation attacks."

I'd like to see the wording changed to something like:
"The client SHOULD reissue the CAPA command after authenticating to check
for active down-negotiation attacks and to get any per user capability
settings."



-----Original Message-----
From: Keith Moore [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 1998 6:30 PM
To: [email protected]; [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: [Off Topic] Need review for POP3 extension mechanism


I apologize for an off-topic posting.  
Please send replies to [email protected], not to the drums or ietf-smtp
lists.

On May 18, a Last Call was issued on for document
draft-gellens-pop3ext-05.txt ,
for Proposed Standard status.  Nobody has commented on the document.  I am 
reluctant to recommend that IESG approve this document without more evidence

of support.

So I'm asking for more review...

Should the document be adopted as is?  Does it need more wordsmithing?
Are all of these capabilities needed?
Are all of the capabilities defined with sufficient precision?

Should the document be standards track or should it be Informational or 
Experimental?

Should the extension mechanism be separated from (and perhaps a different 
status from) the extensions themselves?

If the document is approved for Proposed, should all of the proposed
extensions 
be included?  Or should some of the extensions be moved to a separate 
Informational or Experimental?   Which ones?

In the absence of more community input, my recommendation would be to direct
the authors to remove all of the capabilities from this document, except
those 
which are already defined in standards-track documents.  Additional
capabilities 
could be defined in a separate experimental or informational RFC.

thanks!

Keith Moore
APPS co-AD