Network Working Group R. Sparks
Internet-Draft Tekelec
Intended status: Informational Feb 21, 2012
Expires: August 24, 2012
IETF Email List Archiving, Web-based Browsing and Search Tool
Requirements
draft-sparks-genarea-mailarch-04
Abstract
The IETF makes heavy use of email lists to conduct its work.
Participants frequently need to search and browse the archives of
these lists, and have asked for improved search capabilities. The
current archive mechanism could also be made more efficient. This
memo captures the requirements for improved email list archiving and
searching systems.
Status of this Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on August 24, 2012.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2012 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
Sparks Expires August 24, 2012 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft List Archiving and Search Requirements Feb 2012
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. List Search and Archive Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.1. Search and Browsing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.2. Archiving Active Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.3. Importing Messages from Other Archives . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.4. Exporting messages from the Archives . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.5. Redundancy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.6. Archive Administration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.7. Transition Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3. Internationalized Address Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
7. Changelog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
7.1. 03 to 04 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
7.2. 02 to 03 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
7.3. 01 to 02 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
7.4. 00 to 01 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
8. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Sparks Expires August 24, 2012 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft List Archiving and Search Requirements Feb 2012
1. Introduction
The IETF makes heavy use of email lists to conduct its work.
Participants frequently need to search the archives of these lists,
and have asked for improved search capabilities, particularly when
the search needs to cover a large period of time, or cross several
lists. For instance, document editors, shepherds, working group
chairs, and area directors may need to review all discussion of a
particular draft. That discussion may be spread across the working
group list, one or more directorate lists, and the IETF general list.
Occasionally, work impacts multiple groups, possibly in different
areas, and the search must cover additional working group lists. The
current tools for performing these searches require several manually
coordinated steps, which are error prone. Without a local copy of
the archive (which may not be complete), searching most working group
lists requires brute force effort, aided possibly by web search
engines. More advanced search capabilites have been constructed for
a limited subset of the available lists and are exposed in the "Email
Archives Quick Search" section of the main IETF website. While these
tools are of great assistance, there is still significant need for
improvement. The current archive mechanism could also be made more
efficient. The current practices involve duplicate stores (for the
web and ftp interfaces), which impacts storage and replication, and
is subject to inconsistency. This memo captures the requirements for
improved email list archiving and searching systems.
Discussion of this memo should take place on the ietf@ietf.org
mailing list.
2. List Search and Archive Requirements
2.1. Search and Browsing
o The system must provide a web interface for search and browsing
archived messages.
o The system must allow browsing the entire archive of a given list
by thread or by date.
o The system must allow browsing the results of a search by thread
or by date.
Both threading based on Message-Id/References/In-Reply-To and
threading based on same subject line (modulo short prefixes
like re: and fwd:) should be taken into account.
Sparks Expires August 24, 2012 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft List Archiving and Search Requirements Feb 2012
o The system must allow searching across any subset of the archived
lists (one list, a selection of lists, or all lists).
o The system must allow searching of any combination (using AND and
OR operators) of the following attributes. Richer search
capabilites are highly desirable.
- string occurring in sender name
- date range
- string occurring in Subject
- string occurring in message body
- string occuring in message header (in particular, exact match
of Message-Id)
For instance, it would be nice to search the entire archive
for instances of a message with a given Message-ID with a
URL like <http://datatracker.ietf.org/mlarchive/
msg?id=4EA6E023.6010603@example.com>
o Individual messages must be representable by a long-term stable
URI that can be shared between users. That is, the URI must be
suitable for reference in an email message.
- It would be preferable for that URI to appear in an Archived-At
header field in the message [RFC5064].
o Searches should be representable by a URI that can be shared
between users
- Such URIs should be long-term stable.
- The search may be re-executed when the URI is referenced. It
is acceptable for the same URI to produce different results if
accessed at different times (reflecting additional messages
that may match the search criteria for example.)
2.2. Archiving Active Lists
o The archive system must accept messages handled by various mail
list manager packages.
Sparks Expires August 24, 2012 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft List Archiving and Search Requirements Feb 2012
- Lists hosted on the IETF systems are served by mailman
[mailman].
- Lists hosted at other organizations may use other packages.
* The archive system must accept messages through subscribing
to such an external list.
* The archive system may support other mechanisms for
accepting messages into the archive
2.3. Importing Messages from Other Archives
Lists hosted at other systems are sometimes moved to the IETF
servers, and their archive is moved with them. The archiving system
must be able to import these archives.
o At a minimum the archive system must be able to import mbox
formatted archives [RFC4155][mbox].
o The archive system should be able to import maildir and maildir-
like (the key characteristic being on-message-per-file) formatted
archives [maildir].
o It is acceptable to use a separate utility to convert between
these formats before import as long as the conversion is lossless
2.4. Exporting messages from the Archives
o The archive system must support exporting messages in the mbox
format
o The archive system should support exporting messages in maildir
format
o The archive system must support exporting the entire archive of a
given list
o The archive system must support exporting all messages from a
given list within a given daterange
o The archive system should allow exporting the results of any
supported search query
Sparks Expires August 24, 2012 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft List Archiving and Search Requirements Feb 2012
2.5. Redundancy
o The systems must facilitate providing archive, search, and browse
functions through geographically distributed servers
- The systems must support a single active and single standby
server. This reflects the current operating configuration and
is expected to be the initial deployment model.
- The systems should support a single active and multiple standby
servers.
- The systems should support multiple active servers for the
search and browse functions. Multiple active archive servers
are not a requirement.
- The amount of data replication between servers should be on the
order of the size of any new/changed messages in the archives.
* It is acceptable for replication to be part of the archival
system itself (such as using the replication mechanisms from
an underlying database).
* It is acceptable to rely on replication of the underlying
filesystem objects (using rsync of one or more directory
trees for example), but only if the objects in the
underlying filesystem are formatted such that the size of
the replication data is on the order of the size of any new/
changed messages in the archives.
2.6. Archive Administration
o The archive system must support adding and removing lists to be
archived
o The system must allow the administrator to add messages to and
delete messages from an archived list. The system should log such
actions.
o The system must allow the administrator to delete messages from an
archived list
2.7. Transition Requirements
There are many existing archived messages containing embedded links
into the existing MHonArc mail archive. These links must continue to
work, but should reach the message as archived in the new system.
Sparks Expires August 24, 2012 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft List Archiving and Search Requirements Feb 2012
3. Internationalized Address Considerations
The archive and search functions should anticipate internationalized
email addresses as discussed in the following three documents
[I-D.ietf-eai-rfc5335bis] [I-D.ietf-eai-rfc5336bis]
[I-D.ietf-eai-5738bis]. There is no firm requirement at this time.
4. Security Considerations
Creating a new tool for searching and archiving IETF email lists does
not affect the security of the Internet in any significant fashion.
5. IANA Considerations
This document has no actions for IANA.
6. Acknowledgements
The Tools Development team provided input into this initial
brainstorm. Text suggestions from Alexey Melnikov, Pete Resnick, and
S. Moonesamy have been incorporated.
7. Changelog
7.1. 03 to 04
1. Split IMAP access to the archive into its own document so that it
can be pursued as an independent project.
7.2. 02 to 03
1. Expanded motivation to the Introduction.
7.3. 01 to 02
1. Added request for the Archived-At header field.
2. Pointed to the EAI work in progress and in the RFC Editor queue.
3. Corrected several typos
Sparks Expires August 24, 2012 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft List Archiving and Search Requirements Feb 2012
7.4. 00 to 01
1. Requested ability to import maildir-like archives, not just
maildir proper
2. Added a section requesting IMAP access to the archive.
8. Informative References
[I-D.ietf-eai-5738bis]
Resnick, P., Newman, C., and S. Shen, "IMAP Support for
UTF-8", draft-ietf-eai-5738bis-03 (work in progress),
December 2011.
[I-D.ietf-eai-rfc5335bis]
Yang, A., Steele, S., and N. Freed, "Internationalized
Email Headers", draft-ietf-eai-rfc5335bis-13 (work in
progress), October 2011.
[I-D.ietf-eai-rfc5336bis]
Yao, J. and W. MAO, "SMTP Extension for Internationalized
Email", draft-ietf-eai-rfc5336bis-16 (work in progress),
November 2011.
[RFC4155] Hall, E., "The application/mbox Media Type", RFC 4155,
September 2005.
[RFC5064] Duerst, M., "The Archived-At Message Header Field",
RFC 5064, December 2007.
[maildir] "Maildir", <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir>.
[mailman] "Mailman", <http://www.list.org/>.
[mbox] "Mbox", <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox>.
Sparks Expires August 24, 2012 [Page 8]
Internet-Draft List Archiving and Search Requirements Feb 2012
Author's Address
Robert Sparks
Tekelec
17210 Campbell Road
Suite 250
Dallas, Texas 75254-4203
USA
Email: RjS@nostrum.com
Sparks Expires August 24, 2012 [Page 9]