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.