The IESG has approved the following document: - 'IMAP ANNOTATE Extension ' <draft-ietf-imapext-annotate-16.txt> as an Experimental RFC This document is the product of the Internet Message Access Protocol Extension 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-imapext-annotate-16.txt Technical Summary The ANNOTATE extension to the Internet Message Access Protocol permits clients and servers to maintain "meta data" for messages, or individual message parts, stored in a mailbox on the server. For example, this can be used to attach comments and other useful information to a message. It is also possible to attach annotations to specific parts of a message, so that, for example, they could be marked as seen or important, or a comment added. Working Group Summary The IMAPEXT WG did a lot of good and careful work on this document. Very responsibly, the WG considered at the end whether this was actually going to be implemented. Although several client developers indicated a strong need for annotation functionality, few server developers were willing to commit to implementation (and deployment might be even worse). Thus, the WG reluctantly concluded to publish this as Experimental, hoping that some implementation experience will lead to a better understanding of what it takes to convince server implementors to do this functionality, along with what it takes to implement it robustly and in a decently performant fashion. Protocol Quality The IMAPEXT WG did as much work for this document as would be expected for a Proposed Standard, including Last Calls and several individual reviews. Lisa Dusseault reviewed this document for the IESG. Note to RFC Editor Please add the following paragraph to the abstract. NEW: "Note that this document was the product of a WG which had good consensus on how to approach the problem. Nevertheless, the WG felt it did not have enough information on implementation and deployment hurdles to meet all the requirements of a Proposed Standard. The IETF solicits implementations and implementation reports in order to make further progress." Please add the following sub-section to section 7. NEW: 7.4 Capability registration This document registers "ANNOTATE-EXPERIMENT-1" as an IMAPEXT capability in http://www.iana.org/assignments/imap4-capabilities. _______________________________________________ IETF-Announce@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce
