Re: Intent to revive "expires" header from draft-ietf-mailext-new-fields-15

here's my question - what should _really_ happen when a message "expires"?

I keep most incoming messages for archival purposes.  So I wouldn't want 
my message store to delete them on my behalf - certainly not without my 
explicit consent.  What is "pointless" to you might not be pointless to 
me - even an announcement about a talk that happened before I got the 
announcement is useful information to me - it tells me that the talk 
happened, and there might be a video of it on youtube.

(otoh, the vast majority of calls for papers that I receive - for past 
or future events - are useless to me.  somehow conference organizers 
just Don't Get that they are spammers too)

the most I might want to do with an expiry date is
- for my MUA to optionally hide expired messages from me when displaying 
lists of messages (say in a folder)
- for my MUA to not notify me that I have new mail when an expired 
message arrives.

a similar question - when should a sender set an expiry date?

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, I'm saying that these issues are hard to 
sort out and that's probably why we haven't standardized it yet.

(and regardless of how we define a message's expiry date, getting users 
to understand how to use such things consistently is even harder.)

Keith


Michael Welzl wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> When I get home from a trip, I am annoyed with the large
> number of emails that have already become pointless, as
> they are associated with a date in the past - talk
> announcements, calls for papers and such.
> 
> Microsoft dealt with this issue using their "expiry-date" header,
> but in a non-standard-conforming way (the "expiry-date" header
> is deprecated). Now I wonder: why is there no standard which
> all email clients could support?
> 
> If every email client on the planet would make it really, really
> easy and obvious for the user to set an expiry date when writing
> an email, I'm quite sure that a lot of people would make use
> of this feature.
> 
> So we propose to standardize such a header. We would do this
> by reviving the "Expiry" part of
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-mailext-new-fields-15
> (we've been in touch with the draft's author, Jacob Palme,
> about this, and he likes the idea).
> 
> We even already fulfil the standard IETF requirement of
> having two independent implementations:
> * one by Microsoft (not really standard conforming, but
>   still the same functionality)
> * ours, a plugin for Thunderbird to set the date when sending,
>   and a tool which logs into a pop server to automatically
>   detect expired emails and remark or delete them.
> 
> Our software is available here:
> http://www.welzl.at/research/tools/email/index.html
> 
> Please let us know what you think!
> (and if this is even the right place for this kind of discussion)
> 
> Cheers,
> Michael Welzl  (and Thomas Nolf, in cc)
> 
>