Subject: Protocol Action: 'A Protocol for Remotely Managing Sieve Scripts' to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2009 07:28:15 -0800 (PST)

The IESG has approved the following document:

- 'A Protocol for Remotely Managing Sieve Scripts '
   <draft-ietf-sieve-managesieve-09.txt> as a Proposed Standard

This document is the product of the Sieve Mail Filtering Language Working 
Group. 

The IESG contact persons are Lisa Dusseault and Chris Newman.

A URL of this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-sieve-managesieve-09.txt

Technical Summary

  Sieve scripts allow users to filter incoming email.  Message stores
  are commonly sealed servers so users cannot log into them, yet users
  must be able to update their scripts on them.  This document
  describes a protocol "ManageSieve" for securely managing Sieve
  scripts on a remote server.  This protocol allows a user to have
  multiple scripts, and also alerts a user to syntactically flawed
  scripts.

Working Group Summary
  There was a discussion on the mailing list about use of synchronizing 
  literals in the protocol. An earlier version incorrectly documented  
  existing practice and at the same time was inconsistent with IMAP  
  LITERAL+ extension. So there was a concern that some existing  
  implementation might implement this incorrectly. However the author 
  is not aware of any such implementation.

  More recently, there has been discussion of the overall command 
  structure, mandatory-to-implement security mechanisms, and of some 
  specific details in the sieve URL format. Consensus appears to have 
  been reached on all of these issues.

Document Quality
  There are multiple server and client implementations of the 
  ManageSieve protocol. The following is an incomplete list of servers 
  implementing ManageSieve: CMU, Dbmail, Dovecot, Isode, ArchiveOpteryx, 
  pysieved (Python Managesieve Server), Citadel.

  The following clients are known to implement ManageSieve: Mulberry, 
  Phil Pennock's sieve-connect, Polymer, Ruby/ManageSieve,  
  Net-ManageSieve (perl), SIEVE plugin for Thunderbird, KMail, gsieve,
  Emacs-based ManageSieve implementation.

  Note that many if not most of these implementtations were written 
  according to earlier versions of the specification and may require 
  updates to be compliant with the current version.

Personnel

  Ned Freed is the Document Shepherd.
  Lisa Dusseault reviewed this for the IESG.