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

Frank Ellermann wrote:
> Paul Smith wrote:
>
>   
>> All I can figure out so far is that the expiry of a
>> message implies it's possibly not quite as important,
>> urgent or valid to the sender/recipient/some-other-
>> person as it would have been before it expired.
>>     
>  
>   
>> I'm not sure that's a tight enough definition :)
>>     
>
> From a sender's POV "expired" could mean "if you read
> this mail later whatever I wanted is not more relevant".
>
> Examples:
> "confirm your subscription to list X in the next 3 days"
> "special offer valid until 2008-06-30"
> "I'm out of office until 2008-07-18"
>   
So, what would you want the recipient MUA to do with these. The 
consensus seems to be that they should still receive them - so what 
difference does the 'expires' make? Automatically moving them into 
another folder when they arrive is nearly the same as automatically 
deleting them as far as many users goes! Showing them in grey or another 
colour doesn't stop people having to read them to see if they've missed 
something important.

"confirm your subscription to list X in the next 3 days" is still 
important if you receive it 4 days later. Now you know you need to try 
again to get onto the list.

"I'm out of the office until ..." may be important, you may have been 
bad-mouthing a contact because they hadn't replied to you earlier, and 
now you'll know why

"special offer valid until ..." may still be important from the sender's 
point of view as a "buy our wonderful flying car for only $15,000 before 
30th July, look how amazing it is..." is still a good advertisement if 
it's received on the 1st August, and the recipient may still want it 
even though the special offer has expired.

> Good examples apparently require some kind of mailbot
> on the sender's side.  It is less useful for ordinary
> (sending) MUAs, e.g., "happy birthday" with Expires: 
> makes no sense, or does it ?
>   
No it doesn't. If 'happy birthday' arrived late, you'd still want the 
recipient to know you'd thought of them, so in that case 'better late 
than never' applies.

'expires' only makes sense (IMV) if it would reduce the mail to be read 
by the recipient by getting rid of stuff that's absolutely no use any 
more. In that case, it may as well be deleted automatically - but no one 
wants that. My problem is that I can't think of anything which is 
*absolutely* no use after a certain date (which *would* have been of 
some use before that date). So, you'd still need to read expired mail to 
see if it's of some use to you - in which case what's the point?

-- 
Paul Smith

VPOP3 - POP3/SMTP/IMAP4/Webmail Email server for Windows