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

Bill McQuillan wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 2008-07-29, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 
>> Bill McQuillan <[email protected]> writes:
> 
>>> In netnews the tradition is that the originator of a message "owns" it.
>>> Thus the author is empowered to cancel a message that he or she has
>>> posted and to suggest the lifetime of that message by using the
>>> "Expires:" field.
> 
>> I don't believe this is a correct characterization of how netnews works or
>> how the netnews protocol documents present control over message stores.
>> It is quite well-established in the Usenet world that the operator of a
>> news server has complete control over that message store, including
>> keeping messages for an arbitrary length of time, ignoring Expires,
>> rejecting all cancel messages, and so forth.  The original poster has no
>> control over the message within the protocol once it has left their
>> posting client; they can only provide advisory information and requests.
> 
> Actually, as I understand it an operator only has control of his own local
> store (and any downstream stores which soley depend on his feed.) The
> message I was refering to is a higher level entity that may be cached in
> many thousand stores that no one operator has control over.
> 
> Obviously, there are overrides possible in the real world, but the one
> person that usenet seems to treat as legitimate in sending a cancel message
> is the author. I do not claim that this is an integral part of the
> architecture, but it seems to me that it is a generally accepted feature of
> usenet but not of email.

yes, and I agree that it makes a difference.  if a usenet message sender 
wants to delete a message that he has sent after a particular date, he 
can always issue a cancel for that message on that date.  from that 
perspective, giving the usenet sender the ability to request deletion 
via Expires doesn't create a new capability - it just provides a more 
efficient/precise way to do what could have already been done via a 
cancel message.

Keith