Re: [Last-Call] [standcore.com-standards] Re: Last Call: <draft-billon-expires-06.txt> (Updated Use of the Expires Message Header Field) to Proposed Standard

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

It appears that Keith Moore  <[e-mail]> said:
>On 11/29/22 16:53, John R. Levine wrote:
>
>>
>> I note in passing that if this is a real problem, which I do not 
>> believe it is, an MDA or MUA can easily look at the date on a message 
>> and if it's before 2022, the Expires header is not one of ours. 
>
>Oh please.  We all know that the date of the message does not imply the 
>date of the version of the specification that it conforms to.

It's a heuristic, in this case, likely to be a pretty good one. But it
occurs to me that this same argument could be used to say we can't
ever add any new headers, ever. If I define a new "Flurgle:" header,
how can we know that someone somewhere didn't already use it to mean
something else? It doesn't seem very compelling to me, either for
Expires: or for Flurgle:.

>dangerous feature, especially in the absence of reliable and verifiable 
>authentication.   That, and the sender should not get to dictate when a 
>message is deleted by the recipient.

Please take a look at section 5, where it says not to do that, and propose
text to make it clearer.

Also FWIW we've had the Expires: header in usenet since forever, it's
always been purely advisory, never been authenticated, and it has
turned out to be useful.

R's,
John