Subject: [sieve] SIEVE WG Status
From: Cyrus Daboo <[email-masked]>
To: SIEVE <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2011 11:07:52 -0400
List-Id: SIEVE Working Group <sieve.ietf.org>

Hi folks,
I wanted to give a status update of the WG and also ask a few questions of 
everyone to see where we want to go. This comes at the prompting of our new 
AD who wants to judge the "energy level" of this WG to determine whether it 
makes sense for the WG to continue.

Note that I did request a 1 hour session for the upcoming meeting in Quebec 
City

The last face-to-face WG meeting was last July. Since then the following 
drafts have been through IETF processing and are now in the RFC editor 
queue:

draft-ietf-sieve-autoreply
draft-ietf-sieve-external-lists
draft-ietf-sieve-notify-presence
draft-ietf-sieve-vacation-seconds

These should all be published soon (having mostly been blocked on 
external-lists which was recently approved). Thanks to everyone for their 
work on these.

There has been a WG last call on the draft-ietf-sieve-include document and 
an update to that will be available very shortly so that we can continue 
with IETF processing of that.

All our other drafts are currently expired. From our charter, here are the 
outstanding items that have previous had drafts published:

   (1) Finish work on existing in-progress Working Group documents:
       (b) Notify SIP (draft-ietf-sieve-notify-sip-message)
       (c) RegEx (draft-ietf-sieve-regex)
       (e) Sieve in IMAP (draft-ietf-sieve-imap-sieve)

   (2) Finalize and publish the following SIEVE extensions as proposed
   standards:
       (d) Convert messages (draft-melnikov-sieve-convert)

Can the authors of these documents please provide a status update and 
indicate whether they intend to continue work on them? Can we also have 
other people comment on whether they intend to implement, or at least 
review or help with, any of these drafts?

If the WG does shut down, it seems reasonable for any of these drafts to 
continue on as individual contributions.

At the very least, if we are going to continue work on them I would like to 
see updates published in time for discussion at the IETF meeting (July 11th 
cut-off for draft submission).

We have a bunch of other items on our charter which I have listed below 
with some of my own comments on what I think should happen with them. 
Please comment on these yourselves so we can decide whether to continue or 
drop these from the charter if we decide the WG should continue on.

   (3) Work on a specification for iCalendar and vCard extraction, and
   cooperate with the VCARDDAV WG for address book tests in Sieve.

I suspect I might have been one of the primary movers for this particular 
topic, but at this point I don't it is relevant any more. So I would be in 
favor of dropping this.

   (4) Work on a specification to describe how EAI/IDN issues should be
   handled in SIEVE.

We have periodically asked about this, and most of the time there seemed 
very little that needed to be done in SIEVE to deal with this. One option 
going forward is for the WG to drop this item in favor of it being picked 
up in the EAI WG.

   (5) Work on a "Benefits of SIEVE" guide for client and server vendors
  that:
       (a) Describes the SIEVE protocol and its suite of extensions.
       (b) Explains the benefits of server-side filtering in practical 
terms.
       (c) Shows how client-side filtering can be migrated to SIEVE.

Whilst there was a lot of initial enthusiasm for this when we originally 
did a re-charter, there has been no progress in developing a document. At 
this point I would propose we drop this from the charter.

   (6) Produce one or more informational RFCs containing a set of test
   scripts and test email messages that are to be filtered by the scripts,
   and the expected results of that filtering. This will serve as the basis
   of a interoperability test suite to help determine the suitability of
   moving the base specification and selected extensions to Draft status.

Again there was initial enthusiasm for this, but nothing has materialized, 
so I would also propose dropping this from the charter.

Next question: does anyone have any new SIEVE work they would like to 
propose at this time?

I don't think anyone can deny this WG has been successful over the years in 
addressing the needs of SIEVE implementations, even if at our own, 
sometimes slow, pace. Shutting it down now would not be unreasonable, but I 
think we do need to prove the utility of keeping it alive. So please chime 
in with your thoughts.

-- 
Cyrus Daboo