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

In <[email protected]> Keith Moore <[email protected]> writes:

>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.

I think the most any standard would say is that agents MAY consign that
message to the bit bucket after that date.

But, traditionally, we do not prescribe the inner workings of MUAs (though
we might drop hints as to the *intended* use of some feature). One would
hope that implementation of that "MAY" would be a configurable option in
any decent MUA (but has anyine ever seen a "decent" MUA :-( ).

Of more interest is whether any standard introducing this header should
also try to update the IMAP and POP3 standards by defining circumstances
where such messages could be dropped (but, again, some user configuration
would have to be built in - but then user configuration is already a
feature of IMAP).

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