Network Working Group M. Duerst
Internet-Draft W3C
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The Archived-At Email Header
draft-duerst-archived-at-00
Status of this Memo
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Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
This memo defines a new email header, Archived-At:, to provide a
direct link to the archived form of an individual mail message.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Syntax Definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Supporting Nested Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
4. Implementation Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
6. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Intellectual Property and Copyright Statements . . . . . . . . . 5
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1. Introduction
[RFC2369] defines a number of header fields that can be added to
email messages send by email distribution lists. One of them is the
'List-Archive' header field that describes how to access archives for
the list. This allows to access the archives as a whole, but not the
individual message.
There is often a need or desire to refer to the archived form of a
single message. This memo defines a new header, 'Archived-At', to
refer to a single message in an archive.
2. Syntax Definition
The name of the header field is 'Archived-At'. The content of the
header field is an URI [RFC2369] pointing to an archived version of
the message.
This header field is subject to the encoding and character
restrictions for mail headers as described in [RFC2822].
Additionally, the URI content is further restricted to the set of URI
safe characters [RFC2396].
OPEN ISSUE: For the current X-Archived-At: header, the syntax is very
straightforward, just an URI, without '<' and '>', and not allowing
for comments (or at least we haven't used them at all yet). Question:
should we leave this as is, or move to a syntax more similar with
[RFC2369]?
3. Supporting Nested Lists
If a message is forwarded from a list to a sublist, and both lists
support adding the Archived-At header field, then the sublist should
add a new Archived-At header field without removing the already
existing one(s).
4. Implementation Considerations
This section shortly discusses some implementation considerations.
Mailing list expanders and email archives are often separate pieces
of software. This may make it difficult for the mailing list expander
to create an 'Archived-At' header field.
W3C uses a setup that allows to use the message id of the incoming
mail, combined with a lookup in a database and HTTP redirection, to
find the actual message. As an example, the URI
"http://www.w3.org/mid/1057271304.16158.44.camel@dirk.dm93.org",
containing the message id
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"1057271304.16158.44.camel@dirk.dm93.org", is redirected to the usual
mailing-list archive URI at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-ietf-w3c/2003Jul/
0000.html.
When using the message id to create an address for the archived mail,
care has to be taken to escape characters in the message id that are
not allowed in the URI.
5. Security Considerations
6. Acknowledgements
The members of the W3C system team, in particular Gerald Oskoboiny,
Olivier Thereaux, and Jose Kahan, created the mid-based email archive
lookup system and the experimental form of the Archived-At header.
Pete Resnik provided the motivation for writing up this draft.
References
[RFC2369] Baer, J. and G. Neufeld, "The Use of URLs as Meta-Syntax
for Core Mail List Commands and their Transport through
Message Header Fields", RFC 2369, July 1998.
[RFC2396] Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R. and L. Masinter, "Uniform
Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax", RFC 2396,
August 1998.
[RFC2822] Resnick, P., "Internet Message Format", RFC 2822, April
2001.
Author's Address
Martin Duerst (Note: Please write "Duerst" with u-umlaut wherever
possible, for example as "Dürst in XML and HTML.)
World Wide Web Consortium
200 Technology Square
Cambridge, MA 02139
U.S.A.
Phone: +1 617 253 5509
Fax: +1 617 258 5999
EMail: duerst@w3.org
URI: http://www.w3.org/People/D%C3%BCrst/
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Intellectual Property Statement
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Acknowledgement
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