Re: Treat as a WGLC: draft-martin-managesieve-10.txt

[Jeffrey Hutzelman <[e-mail]>]

--On Monday, July 07, 2008 09:40:11 PM +0100 Robert Burrell Donkin 
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 9:23 PM, Jeffrey Hutzelman <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> --On Monday, July 07, 2008 08:27:59 PM +0100 Robert Burrell Donkin
>> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>>> it seems unfortunate that this means that a separate port is required
>>> for sieve management. a compatible extension to IMAP would allow sieve
>>> management using the same URI.
>>
>> That makes the assumption that sieve scripts live only in IMAP servers,
>> which I don't think we want to do.
>
> not at all :-)
>
> the function contained in this protocol is really very trivial. i
> doubt that any implementator using a storage mechanism other than IMAP
> would bother creating an implementation rather than just reusing their
> preferred protocol at the application level. for example, HTTP is a
> well known protocol whose secruity characterics are know well
> understood. sieve maintainance using RESTful HTTP would be much
> simpler than creating an implementations of this novel protocol.

Only if you have a web server and a bunch of related infrastructure lying 
around.  If you're implementing sieve support in an MTA, such that admins 
or even user can provide sieve scripts to be run as incoming mail is being 
accepted (rather than waiting until it hits the mail store), then you may 
not have the luxury of requiring people who want to use the new feature to 
run web servers on their inbound MX's.

Now, I don't claim to be such an implementor, but I don't believe that HTTP 
is the answer to all protocol problems any more than HTML is the answer to 
all user interface problems.

-- Jeff