Subject: [Asrg] Standardization of RFC headers for email content analysis?

From: Clifton Royston <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 11:06:10 -1000

I just thought I'd throw this out there, as I've quickly skimmed the
archives and haven't seen any discussion of this yet:

  Would anyone consider it worthwhile for this group to put some focus
on making existing email content analysis/filter tools (in particular
anti-spam software) more interoperable?

  I suggest a useful step in that direction to be defining a standard
for how they should utilize mail headers to announce the results of
their analysis.  Right now it seems that every program uses a different
set of made up X-Headers in a different and incompatible way.  (Well,
except for ours, which uses "Comments:" headers in a different and
incompatible way.)

  This is very limited in scope relative to the "big picture" issues
this group seems to be chartered to discuss, but I think it would be
very helpful to improve interoperability, effectiveness, and ease of
engineering solutions in the near term.
  -- Clifton

P.S. Hi, Chris!
-- 
     Clifton Royston  --  LavaNet Systems Architect --  [email-masked]

  "If you ride fast enough, the Specialist can't catch you."
  "What's the Specialist?" Samantha says. 
  "The Specialist wears a hat," says the babysitter. "The hat makes noises."
  She doesn't say anything else.  
                      Kelly Link, _The Specialist's Hat_
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From: "Bob Wyman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 17:32:46 -0500

The charter calls for both a taxonomy of existing methods as
well as an evaluation of those methods. It would seem that both efforts
would be served by documentation of the various extended headers in use
today. Collecting information about the headers used today would also be
critical to any effort such as the one that you propose to make tools
that rely on header extensions more interoperable.
	Can you document one or more of the sets of extended headers
used today? If so, I'd love to see it.

		bob wyman

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
Clifton Royston
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2003 4:06 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: [Asrg] Standardization of RFC headers for email content
analysis?

P.S. Hi, Chris!
-- 
     Clifton Royston  --  LavaNet Systems Architect --
[email-masked]

  "The Specialist wears a hat," says the babysitter. "The hat makes
noises."

---

From: Clifton Royston <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 15:01:36 -1000

> used today? If so, I'd love to see it.

  I don't have much as yet, but I'll try to throw some notes together.
Others are welcome to contribute.

  -- Clifton

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 20:35:05 -0500

> anti-spam software) more interoperable?

I don't think this is sufficiently close to our charter, nor do I think this
is appropriate activity for a research group.  We might try to decide whether
some standard for interoperability between such tools would be useful,
but actually trying to define how they interoperate is better left for a
standards group.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 20:41:53 -0500

> today.

far too detalied, I think, and probably off the mark.  in particular, message
headers are part of the payload to be transmitted from sender to recipient,
not part of the envelope used by the transfer/delivery system. i.e. they are not
an appropriate means to transmit information between different parts of the 
delivery system.

that and for the purpose of this discussion it's probably sufficient if we
classify a few kinds of things that analysis tools look for (e.g. originator
characteristics, signal path, gross message characteristics, specific
items in the content) and some of the kinds of filtering that are done based
on the analysis (e.g. discard, bounce, alter, delay, require confirmation)
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