A new working group has been formed in the Applications Area
of the IETF. For additional information, contact the Area Directors
or the WG Chair.
Enhancements to Internet email to support diverse service
environments (lemonade)
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Current Status: Active Working Group
Chairs:
Eric Burger <eburger@snowshore.com>
Glenn Parsons <gparsons@nortelnetworks.com>
Applications Area Director(s):
Ned Freed <ned.freed@mrochek.com>
Ted Hardie <hardie@qualcomm.com>
Mailing lists:
General Discussion: um@snowshore.com
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Archive: http://flyingfox.snowshore.com/um_archive/maillist.html
Description of Working Group:
Lemonade is tasked to provide a set of enhancements and profiles of
Internet email submission, transport, and retrieval protocols to
facilitate operation on platforms with constrained resources, or
communications links with high latency or limited bandwidth. A primary
goal of this work is to ensure that those profiles and enhancements
continue to interoperate with the existing Internet email protocols in
use on the Internet, so that these environments and more traditional
Internet users have access to a seamless service.
Lemonade's work is at the crossroads of a body of work related to
Internet messaging, in particular work done by the VPIM, FAX, and
IMAPEXT IETF working groups. Given the potentially broad scope of
activities this group could engage in, the group will focus
specifically on the following work items:
0. An informational RFC or RFCs will be produced on LEMONADE
architecture and the issues it seeks to address.
1. Enhance the existing IMAP4 message retrieval and message submission
(RFC 2476) protocols to satisfy the requirements for handling streaming
multimedia content. The existing standards-track CONNEG framework
will be used if content negotiation capabilities are needed. The
group will employ existing protocols (such as for streaming) with
IMAP4 instead of duplicating such functionality within IMAP4.
2. Enhance the existing IMAP4 message retrieval and/or message submission
(RFC 2476) protocols to satisfy the requirements for forwarding a
message and/or its attachments without downloading the message to the
client and subsequently uploading the message to a server.
3. Refine the existing IMAP4 message retrieval protocol to facilitate
its use with devices that have limited capabilities such as mobile
endpoints. At most one backwards compatible profile of IMAP4 will be
produced by this effort.
4. Define a format for message notifications for servers reporting
message status information to other servers. Specify the method for
delivery of those notifications.
5. Create a specification describing the use of Internet message
services in environments where message delivery may take place using
either Internet protocols or through an MMS server using
WAP to communicate with the receiving user agent.
Any protocols defined by this working group will include appopriate
security mechanisms, including authentication, privacy, and access
control. Mandatory-to-implement security mechanisms will be specified
as needed in order to guarantee secure protocol interoperability.
The transport area will be consulted to deal with any transport-related
issues that arise, especially in regards to items 1-4 above.
The IAB is currently working on the specification of general guidelines
and requirements for notification services. Once complete this work
will be used as input to item 4 above.
The working group is aware of several related activities in other groups:
- 3GPP TSG T WG2 SWG3 Messaging <http://www.3gpp.org/TB/T/T2/T2.htm>
- W3C Mulitmodal interaction Activity <http://www.w3.org/2002/mmi/>
- Open Mobile Alliance <http://www.openmobilealliance.org/>
- 3GPP2 TSG-X <http://3gpp2.org/Public_html/X/index.cfm>"
The goal is to coordinate efforts with at least these groups as required.
While there is obvious synergy, given the end-of-life of the VPIM and FAX
work groups and the similar membership, the working group does not
expect to coordinate with these other groups.
Goals and Milestones:
Jun 2003 - Submit LEMONADE requirements and architecture specification
to the IESG
Jul 2003 - Submit server to server notification protocol to the IESG
Sep 2003 - Submit IMAP4 and message submission extensions for streaming
multimedia to the IESG
Nov 2003 - Submit IMAP4 profile for mobile devices to the IESG
