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

In <[email protected]> Michael Welzl <[email protected]> writes:

>Hi all,


>On Sun, 2008-07-27 at 13:35 -0400, Hector Santos wrote:

>[snip]


>> IMO, if we can't make this new proposal of a Sender define "expires" 
>> header consistent with already existing standard practices, then IMO, 
>> it should be call something else.

>To repeat the nice definition that Keith gave us, and which most
>of us seem to like:

>"The sender believes this message will be irrelevant 
>after the indicated date/time."

>- hence we could call it "Relevant-until:"


>The problem that I see with using a different name at this
>point is that "Expires" already exists, with roughly the
>meaning that we want - not only in the netnews context,
>but also for MIXER (RFC 2156), as a renamed version
>of the obsolete "Expiry-Date" field according to RFC 4021.
>Additionally, despite being obsolete, Expiry-Date is
>currently in use, in the way that we want, with MS Outlook.

Yes, but RFC 2156 is only concerned with messages gatewayed from X.400 so
as to preserve the X.400 expiry information (whatever that might mean). I
am sure that any non-standard usage by MS Outlook did not derive in any
way from RFC 2156.

<rant>
In fact, when RFC 1327 invented Expiry-Date, it was just fine. It wasn't
"broke", so when they came to do RFC 2156 Jacob Palme decided to "fix" it
by taking the widely used (but at that time undocumented) Expires header
from Netnews, changing its syntax and semantics, and building it in. All
of which was a severe embarassment when we came to do the proper Netnews
definition in Usefor. We should be delighted if some 2156-bis were to
change it back again.
</rant>

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