ietf-mta-filters
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RE: MTA Filters BOF request, LA IETF; Proposed Charter

1998-01-14 18:53:52
I'm afraid I'm a little confused by what you mean here unless you have 
in mind the practical difficulty involved in having POP3 accounts and 
the like act upon messages in a timely manner. In terms of 
functionality, I can't think of any filtering task I can perform on 
the MS Exchange system I use here that I cannot perform on my Internet 
account. But in all fairness, on my other account I run procmail on 
the UNIX box that is also the POP/IMAP server. I can certainly 
appreciate that most ISPs would be reluctant to allow customers to set 
up their own procmail recipes. In fact, when I do recommend procmail 
to people I usually practically stand on my head to convince them that 
they should have someone who knows what they're doing set it up and 
then test things *carefully*.

Gregory Woodhouse gregory(_dot_)woodhouse(_at_)med(_dot_)va(_dot_)gov
May the dromedary be with you.


----------
From:  Steve Hole [SMTP:steve(_at_)esys(_dot_)ca]
Sent:  Wednesday, January 14, 1998 3:47 PM
To:  ietf-mta-filters(_at_)imc(_dot_)org
Subject:  Re: MTA Filters BOF request, LA IETF; Proposed Charter

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On Tue, 13 Jan 1998 11:57:21 +0100 Tomas Fasth 
<tomas(_dot_)fasth(_at_)twinspot(_dot_)net>
wrote:

Please, hold just there for a moment.
My opinion is that large ISP anti-spam issues are quite different 
from
UA-filtering. I think it will improve the discussion a lot if we 
can
agree on that.

Exactly.   The issues and requirements for dealing with SPAM are far
from well defined.   It may be that Sieve turns out to be a useful 
tool
for dealing with SPAM, maybe not.   That was not the origin of Sieve 
--
it was conceived to do unattended rule based processing on messages.

==> Begin Soapbox

I believe the following to be obvious to everyone.  However, we are
arguing for the start of a new standards track activity so it is
important that everyone have a good understanding on this.

The requirements for "unattended UA actions" (rather than filtering) 
are
reasonably well defined.   There are a number of highly successful
proprietary mail systems that support this type of functionality.
Make no mistake, implementing the same level of functionality in an
Internet client is not an option for any vendor serious about using 
the
Internet mail architecture as a competitor to proprietary systems.

To execute unattended actions you need rules.   Rules bind message
matching criteria together with actions.   If a message matches some
criteria, execute one or more actions.  We have been doing this for 
some
time, and there is good engineering experience as to the advantages 
and
pitfalls.