Michael Welzl wrote:
On Wed, 2008-07-23 at 10:19 +0100, Chris Haynes wrote:
2) Can the semantics of an 'expired' message be agreed and communicated in a
clean, simplistic, non-technical way?
Yes, because these semantics aren't very complicated.
A possible justification comes from considering that hard disk space
has become much cheaper in recent years, thus many servers allow more
messages to live in a given mailbox, and users have to face archiving
issues. A MUA I use offers the option to move all past month Sent
messages to a new subfolder. I'd prefer that to be yearly. If
archiving were driven by expiry date, it would be easier to customize.
One could then be tempted to set a default expiry date on messages
that don't have one already. In that respect, it may make sense to
either add an attribute specifying who did set the expiry date, or
state that only the author is allowed to do that. If a message's
author said it's expired, a MUA should generate a warning whenever a
user tries to reply to it, and propose to write a new message instead,
prompting for a new subject in case the user agrees.
Just a couple of clean, simplistic, non-technical issues...