Re: [apps-discuss] Spam reporting over IMAP

[Lyndon Nerenberg <[e-mail]>]

On 2012-01-09, at 15:48 PM, Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:

> I think at this point perhaps a higher-level question is in order: Are we (either IETF in general, or APPSAWG specifically) interested in or willing to put time into developing this in conjunction with OMA? Would this be something ultimately beneficial to have, and have it come from us?

I'm sure many people would like to see something like SREP, but IMAP is absolutely the wrong place to put it.  IMAP servers store messages.  An IMAP server doesn't decide whether something is spam, and is in no way capable of doing anything about it.

SPAM filtering happens further up the delivery chain, usually within the MDA, or a preceding MTA, typically one that borders the recipient's site.  For an SREP-like system to have value, it needs to be able to provide feedback to the appropriate location in the delivery chain.  A generic reporting protocol might be a way of doing this, but it needs to be agnostic of the message stores and transport agents if it's to be useful.

So while I applaud the concept, the proposed solution isn't even close to baked.

--lyndon