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

2008-07-24 07:11:09

Jeff Macdonald wrote:

On Wed, 2008-07-23 at 08:16 -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
"MUAs, Message Stores, and MTAs, MUST NOT delete a message on the basis of an Expired header field unless given explicit instructions to do so by the recipient."

I find it very desirable to have MTAs generate a bounce if the message
is older than the Expired header.

(What does it mean for a message to be older than a header contained within the message? I assume you mean "... if the date in the Expired header is after the current date.")

I absolutely would not want an MTA to do that, because as been widely observed here, even expired messages are sometimes relevant to a recipient - just in a more limited set of circumstances than before they expired.

(And in general I'm pretty fed up with MTS components deleting messages that I need to receive because they think they know better than me what I need to read. I recently had a spam filter trash a job offer in my incoming mail. I'd love to hunt down the person who wrote that filter rule....)

Now it might also be useful if there were a MTS feature that would let a sender say "don't bother delivering this message if you can't get it there before <date>". But I don't think that's what we're talking about here. (and if there were such a feature it should be implemented in SMTP rather in the message header).

Keith.

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