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

["Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In <488E93C3.2050609@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Hector Santos <winserver.support@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

>In my view, the conflictive issues are:

>1) Servers which employ automatic purging of old messages
>    MAY let this field influence the purging process.

>or

>2) Servers which employ automatic purging of old messages
>    MUST NOT let this field influence the purging process.

>or

>3) Servers which employ automatic purging of old messages
>    SHOULD NOT let this field influence the purging process
>    without USER PERMISSION.

But what do you mean be "servers" here? Surely you don't mean MTAs,
because they are not in the business of storing messages (beyond maybe for
7 days or so trying to deliver a message, after which then bounce it back
up the Return-Path as "undeliverable")?

Or do you mean IMAP and POP servers? AFAICS, those are the _only_ places
where some semantic action connected with the Expires header MIGHT be
specified, and even there it would have to be a user-configurable option.
But that is a matter to be dealt with in some future IMAP-bis or POP-bis
standard.

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