[mailmaint] A mailbox provider's view of Expires

[Richard Clayton <[e-mail]>]

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I have been consulting with colleagues at Yahoo about the Expires:
proposal.

In our view the current proposal is too vague to be of any use to
anyone. As mailbox providers we are expected to "de-emphasise" expired
messages. That could mean we put them in an archive, hide them from
searches, display them in a different font, or pretty much anything
apart from not doing something useful like moving them to "trash" or
refusing to accept messages such as password resets that have been so
delayed as to be useless to the recipient.

Since mailbox providers who bother to implement anything at all are
likely to make different choices we do not see that the header is of
much practical use to senders either because they can have no well-
founded expectation as to what will occur.

That said we can see some use cases for marking particular emails as
having a "best before" or "use by" date (food labelling distinguishes
between perishable items that may be of lower quality , or may be unsafe
to consume, once a certain time is reached).

We encourage the working group to scrap the current draft and to work on
specific use cases:

        password reset and account recovery;

        marketing email with time-limited offers;

        meeting invitations;

to name just three.

We would be happy to consider supporting well-specified semantics where
it is crystal-clear to all concerned whether out of date messages should
or should not be transported, displayed or stored somewhere specific.

- -- 
richard                                                   Richard Clayton

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary 
Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Benjamin Franklin 11 Nov 1755

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