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

Jeff Macdonald wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2008-07-23 at 08:16 -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
>> "MUAs, Message Stores, and MTAs, MUST NOT delete a message on the basis 
>> of an Expired header field unless given explicit instructions to do so 
>> by the recipient."
> 
> I find it very desirable to have MTAs generate a bounce if the message
> is older than the Expired header.

(What does it mean for a message to be older than a header contained 
within the message?  I assume you mean "... if the date in the Expired 
header is after the current date.")

I absolutely would not want an MTA to do that, because as been widely 
observed here, even expired messages are sometimes relevant to a 
recipient - just in a more limited set of circumstances than before they 
expired.

(And in general I'm pretty fed up with MTS components deleting messages 
that I need to receive because they think they know better than me what 
I need to read. I recently had a spam filter trash a job offer in my 
incoming mail.   I'd love to hunt down the person who wrote that filter 
rule....)

Now it might also be useful if there were a MTS feature that would let a 
sender say "don't bother delivering this message if you can't get it 
there before <date>".  But I don't think that's what we're talking about 
here.  (and if there were such a feature it should be implemented in 
SMTP rather in the message header).

Keith.