2.1.8 Sieve Mail Filtering Language (sieve)

NOTE: This charter is a snapshot of the 61st IETF Meeting in Washington, DC USA. It may now be out-of-date.

Last Modified: 2004-10-20

Chair(s):

Ned Freed <ned.freed@mrochek.com>
Matt Wall <wall@cyrusoft.com>

Applications Area Director(s):

Ted Hardie <hardie@qualcomm.com>
Scott Hollenbeck <sah@428cobrajet.net>

Applications Area Advisor:

Ted Hardie <hardie@qualcomm.com>

Mailing Lists:

General Discussion:
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Description of Working Group:

The sieve mail filtering language specified in RFC 3028 has now been
implemented in a wide variety of user agents (UAs), mail delivery agents
(MDAs), and mail transfer agents (MTAs). Several extensions have been
specified (RFCs 3431, 3598, 3685, 3894) and have also been widely
implemented. Several additional sieve extensions have been defined in
various internet-drafts.

All of these documents are individual submissions; up to this point
work on sieve has been done informally and not under the auspices of
any IETF working group.

The sieve working group is being chartered to:

(1) Revise the base sieve specification, RFC 3028, with the intention of
moving it to draft standard. Substantive additions or revisions to the
base specification are out of scope of this working group. However, the
need to loosen current restrictions on side effects of tests as well as
the need for a normative reference to the newly-defined comparators
registry may necessitate a recycle at proposed.

(2) Produce updated sieve relational (RFC 3431), subaddress (RFC 3598),
spamtest/virustest (RFC 3685), and copy (RFC 3894) extension
specifications, again with the intention of making a move to
draft standard possible. It may be necessary to recycle some or all
of these documents at proposed, depending on the scope of any changes.

(3) Finalize and publish the sieve extensions as proposed standards:

(a) Variables (draft-homme-sieve-variables-04.txt)
(b) Vacation action (draft-showalter-sieve-vacation-05.txt)
(c) Message body tests (draft-degener-sieve-body-02.txt)
(d) Regular expressions (draft-murchison-sieve-regex-07.txt)
(e) MIME part tests (draft-daboo-sieve-mime-00.txt)
(f) Notification action (draft-martin-sieve-notify-02.txt)
(g) IMAP flags (draft-melnikov-sieve-imapflags-06.txt)
(h) Header editing actions (draft-degener-sieve-editheader-01.txt)
(i) Reject before delivery (draft-elvey-refuse-sieve-01.txt)

Additional drafts may be added this list, but only via a charter
revision. There must also be demonstrable willingness in the sieve
development community to actually implement a given extension before
it can be added to this charter.

Some aspects of sieve have complex internationalization issues; the
working group will seek out internationalization expertise as needed to
complete its work.

Goals and Milestones:

No Current Internet-Drafts

No Request For Comments

Current Meeting Report

Minutes of SIEVE BOF at IETF 61, 11-Nov-2004

(Raw log at <http://www.xmpp.org/ietf-logs/sieve@ietf.xmpp.org/2004-11-11.txt>)

- MEETING OPENED

Agenda bashing - no changes to agenda.
Apologies from Alexey, stuck in UK.

History lesson of SIEVE from Cyrus.

Current proposed WG status:

IESG are talking about WG formation at next telechat Thursday, unless something drastic happens, there should be a WG.

TOPIC: Base spec revision

- List of issues from Tim presented.
- Most issues are relatively minor.
- Major issue: variables draft needs a side-effect on test, but base draft says MUST NOT. Needs to be fixed.
- No other issues brought up.

TOPIC: Relation revision

- Issue: ge, gt, etc not specified.
- No other issues brought up.

TOPIC: Subaddress revision
- No issues brought up.
- No need to rev right now.

TOPIC: Spamtest/Virustest

- Request for :percent parameter.
- Consensus to add this in a backwards compatible manner with new 'require' capability.
- Cyrus will rev spec.

TOPIC: Variables

-05 recently posted to mailing list.
- Still need discussion on how it interacts with other actions.
- Discussed interaction with base spec and requirement to loosen MUST NOT in base.
- Consensus was to get revised base spec draft first then do WGLC on variables.
- Question about whether setdate was needed. Consensus was that it can wait.

TOPIC: Vacation

- Request for :from argument to allow setting MAIL FROM or From: header in vacation message.
- Needed to help with case of multiple addresses tied to a single mailbox.
- Consensus was to add :from argument to vacation with new 'require' capability for backwards compatibility.
- Tim should revise spec and then we WGLC it.

TOPIC: Body test

- Issue on use of :binary - can it be removed.
- Consensus to remove :binary.
- Issue with interaction with variables and :regex and :matches scans only in body.
- Jutta will make changes and submit ready for WGLC.

TOPIC: Edit Header

- Issue on use of deleteheader :index/:last arguments - are they needed?
- Jutta will make this change and submit revised spec for discussion.

TOPIC: regexp draft

- Issue of interaction with variables.
- Ken will properly reference variables.
- Issue of i18n unicode regex's.
- No consensus on appropriate way forward on this after much debate.
- Committee of Ken, Ned & John K to research this and report back.

TOPIC: MIME parts test

- Consensus that this is a worthwhile test to have.
- Authors of two current proposals will get together and produce a unified spec.

TOPIC: Refuse test

- Debate about whether two actions or one should be used for this.
- Consensus was to remove 'reject' from base spec and have a new draft for modified 'reject' command.
- No consensus on details of unified action - authors will submit new draft for discussion.

TOPIC: IMAP flags

- Should spec reference variables or do its own thing (as it does now).
- General agreement that we need to pick one way to do this and get on with it!
- Consensus in room was go away and figure this out on the mailing list.

TOPIC: Notify

- Ned will take over authorship of draft.

Other issues:

- Q: interest in resurrecting script interaction draft?
- There seem to be some differences in how existing implementations exactly do this, and reluctance to make changes to conform to the draft.

- MEETING CLOSED

Slides

None received.