Hector Santos wrote:
Keith Moore wrote:
Michael Welzl wrote:
That's what we have filters for! You could let your client
move the email to some subfolder, mark it somehow (light
grey in the list, whatever - up to your client), or just
delete it (like I would).
I'd love to believe that mail clients will be that flexible.
MUA like Firefox offer plug-in support that pretty much allow you do do
whatever you like. Of course, plug-ins are not standard.
more to the point, they're not widely used enough to get traction for
new email features.
This proposal can serve well to standardize the header itself, thats
the easy part. But how it will apply is a different ball of wax. The
MUA side can deal with it by moving it into folders or deleting it.
...or by showing them in a different color, or optionally hiding them in
summaries. if the only options most MUAs provided were effectively
deleting them, that would IMHO be a bad result.
But how it applies with the server, would be under the common
MUA/Server Interface options generally offered for the mail server
account. So a new Expiration Headers option can be added:
[X] Keep Mail on Server for Days: ____ <--- common MUA
feature to control server storage
[X] Support Expiration Headers <--- new RFC
related feature
yet another configuration knob to twiddle for an interface (MUA to
message store) that's already notoriously hard for users to get right.
heck, we still have WAY too many people using POP or IMAP with cleartext
passwords, mostly because that's the configuration that "works" with all
clients and servers, and partially because there's no uniform language
to describe the other configurations. (does "use secure authentication"
mean APOP, or POP+SSL over a reserved port, or POP with the STARTTLS
command?)
Both of which is at best a request to delete (DEL command) and no way
dictates or overrides what the server policy is in the area of mail
destruction.
A more useful MUA (OFFLINE or ONLINE) option would be to add a 3rd option:
[X] Server MAY use Expire Headers to delete (or mail received) mail
before mail pickup.
As you pointed out, this can help lower the mail pickup payload
overhead, which can be fairly high these days with laissez-faire usage
of html and attachments and over bloated wasted bandwidth of headers.
I already have way too much mail being either deleted or misfiled by
spam filters. The last thing I want is even more justification for MSPs
to delete messages without my explicit consent.
Keith