Re: [Asrg] Adding a spam button to MUAs

Steve Atkins <steve@blighty.com> Mon, 01 February 2010 17:10 UTC

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From: Steve Atkins <steve@blighty.com>
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Subject: Re: [Asrg] Adding a spam button to MUAs
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On Feb 1, 2010, at 8:57 AM, Ian Eiloart wrote:

> 
> 
> --On 1 February 2010 14:59:03 +0000 John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
> 
>> You're right, for the minority of us who run IMAP.  For everyone else
>> who uses POP, mailing an ARF report back to the POP server may be the
>> best we can do.
> 
> So, are we looking at an IMAP/ANNOTATE extension for IMAP users and an RFC5451 modification for SMTP users? The IMAP/ANNOTATE is much more efficient than sending an abuse report, and less susceptible to outside interference.
> 
> Does ARF allow richer expression than ANNOTATE?

Probably - it's basically a container format.

More importantly, perhaps, it would be easy to roll out on existing installations with a trivial configuration change, rather than requiring functionality in the mailstore that may not be there.

It also doesn't require anything more of the MUA other than the ability to construct and send a basic MIME email, and works identically for mail retrieved via IMAP, POP, SQL, HTTP, mbox, maildir or any of the other obscure ways people access their mail stores.

As for efficiency, I was picturing two variants of the header - one which sends a copy of the entire email, and so doesn't require any shared state between client and mailstore, and one which sends back just the contents of the header (which could include a message-id, an IMAP UID or some system specific primary key).

Cheers,
  Steve