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

[email protected] wrote:
> But even if there was justification for additional work on calendaring that
> isn't already being done somewhere else, it's a completely separate problem
> from message expiration. Message expiration is just about saying when, in the
> opinion of the sender, the content of a given message - whatever it happens to
> be - is no longer going to be useful. The semantics don't extend to inferring
> that a message with an expiration date necessarily describes some sort of event
> and that the expiration time is somehow related to the time of the event.
>
> When you get down to it this is really about being able to manage
> ever-increasing amounts of email a litte more easily. If we try and take it
> further than that we'll lose focus and likely derail the entire proposal.
>   
I guess I'm with Bill on this. My main issue with an 'expires' header is 
that it will mean many things to many people. That means that it will 
only be really useful if YOU set the expires header on messages you 
receive (which obviously is not going to be very common). Since most 
people seem to want it to be defined in a woolly way, it could mean 
absolutely anything, which means that there's only a limited amount you 
could actually do with it since you don't know what the sender actually 
meant it for. This woolliness is also going to mean that no one with any 
sense will set it, because they don't know what the recipient is going 
to do with it - some may mark it the message as more urgent if it has 
just expired, others might delete it - so the safest thing to do is not 
to set it at all...

Having a stricter definition would help IMHO, as the sender would have a 
chance to know how the recipient will interpret it, and the recipient 
will have a chance to know what the sender meant by it.

-- 
Paul Smith

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