Subject: Protocol Action: 'Sieve Extension: Relational Tests' to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2006 14:24:05 -0500

The IESG has approved the following document:

- 'Sieve Extension: Relational Tests '
   <draft-ietf-sieve-3431bis-04.txt> as a Proposed Standard

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

The IESG contact persons are Scott Hollenbeck and Ted Hardie.

A URL of this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-sieve-3431bis-04.txt

Technical Summary
 
This document is a revision of RFC 3431. The "relational" Sieve mail
filtering language extension adds two relational match types. The COUNT
match type allows a script to count a number of entities of a particular
type, e.g. number of email addresses in a header field, number of header
fields.  The VALUE match type gives script writers the ability to
perform "greater than" or "less than" comparisons, instead of just
equality comparison available in the base Sieve language.
 
Working Group Summary
 
This document started as a minor update to RFC 3431. It updated references,
fixed several errors in examples. Some clarifications were made as well,
for example clarification on how to count a number of addresses in a RFC
2822 email group.

A new technical issue was brought up during WGLC. RFC 3431 required that
all leading spaces must be stripped from values before performing a
relational test, as spaces between a header field name and its value
are not significant.  However the Sieve variables extension added a new
test for which this rule didn't make sense anymore.

A related issue about stripping trailing spaces was also brought up,
as preservation of trailing spaces in RFC 2822 header fields can't be
guaranteed while the message is in transit.

Both issues were discussed at length on the mailing list and the WG
reached consensus to remove both leading and trailing spaces when testing or
modifying a header field value. The requirement to strip leading/trailing
spaces was moved from the relational document to the base Sieve document.
 
Protocol Quality
 
Working group reviewers include Ned Freed, Philip Guenther, Michael Haardt,
and Mark E. Mallett.  Scott Hollenbeck has reviewed the specification for
the IESG.  Implementations include CMU Sieve and Sun.