ietf-mta-filters
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: ManageSieve: sieve: URIs and OWNER capability

2008-11-25 16:02:36

Alexey Melnikov wrote:

[...]

Then two other changes would make this particularly useful:
1. Allow a script name (at least in putscript) to be either a Sieve URI
or a local name.  This allows, for example, a secretary to set the
script for her boss.

We've discussed this in more details in Minneapolis and the room agreement was that ManageSieve commands should accept URIs in addition to script names.
However, I am having second thoughts on this.

1). It looks like at least the following commands would need to be updated:
HAVESPACE, PUTSCRIPT, GETSCRIPT, DELETESCRIPT

But LISTSCRIPTS returns script names. Should it be changed to return URIs? I think this would break all existing clients, so I don't think that an unextended version of LISTSCRIPTS should do that.

Also, should it list *all* scripts accessible by the current user, or just personal scripts? The former seems like an extension that Dilian was talking about.

2). Considering that Sieve script names are in Unicode it would also make sense to specify IRI version of Sieve URIs. I frankly don't have experience specifying IRIs.


So my current thinking is that these changes might have undesired effects on existing clients and they also seem to require quite a bit of work. But I really want to get this document done (for Lemonade/OMA MEM among other things). So can we postpone this change till an extension?

2. Add a capability that advertises the owner name that applies to a given managesieve session (this would be derived from the authentication id).

[I think Chris meant "authorization identity" above.]

So, OWNER corresponds to 2). When using SASL authentication a client can authenticate as one person ("authentication identity"), but be allowed to act as another ("authorization identity"). OWNER is returning the latter.

I have a weak preference for having the OWNER capability. So far I found a couple of reasons for it:

Imagine you have a ManageSieve client that need to process several Sieve URIs (e.g. to update several scripts). The client would be able to compare the "owner" part of an URI against the value returned in the OWNER capability in order to decide if it needs to authenticate as another user before processing another script identified by a URI.

I also think that the OWNER capability can be useful for debugging (i.e. for analyzing protocol trace logs). Of course this only helps if the client requests capabilities after authentication.

I've missed another obvious use case: constructing URIs to give them to third parties.