Network Working Group I. Learmonth Internet-Draft Uni. of Aberdeen Expires: February 12, 2015 August 11, 2014 An Internet Message Header For Providing Hackerspace Affiliation Information draft-learmonth-hackerspace-header-00 Abstract This memo presents a new Internet message header that allows the sender of Internet messages to provide hackerspace affiliation information to the recipients. Recipients of Internet messages can use this header to look up the hackerspace affiliation of the sender of the message. Status of This Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. 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Learmonth Expires February 12, 2015 [Page 1] Internet-Draft Hackerspace: Internet Message Header August 2014 1. Introduction A hackerspace is a community-operated workspace where people with common interests, often in computers, machining, technology, science, digital art or electronic art, can meet, socialize and/or collaborate. Hackerspaces, like a lot of other Internet communities, perform a lot of their communication on Internet mailing lists. Some hackers may subscribe to the mailing lists of other hackerspaces, or communicate on Internet mailing lists for discussion between hackerspaces on a regional, national or global level. It can be helpful for hackers to identify to which hackerspace other hackers they are communicating with are affiliated. [RFC1036] defines an Organization: header which contains "a short phrase describing the organization to which the sender belongs". [RFC2076] notes that this header was never standardised for use in e-mail but only in USENET messages. Some MUAs still have implemented this header however. If the Organization: header were to be used, it would be more suitable for it to contain a reference to the sender's employer or school than the sender's hackerspace. The header's text is also unstructured and does not lean itself to being read by machines. This memo presents a new Internet message header that allows the sender of Internet messages to provide hackerspace affiliation information to the recipients of the message in a machine-readable format. 2. Hackerspace: header The header's text is built from the name of the hackerspace and the URL of the hackerspace's home page as described below. hackerspace = "Hackerspace" ":" SP space-name SP "<" space-url ">" space-name = string space-url = http_URL http_URL is defined in [RFC2616]. The Hackerspace: header MAY be added to Internet messages by those affiliated with a hackerspace. MUAs MAY optionally only add the header when sending messages to hackerspace-related recipients. Learmonth Expires February 12, 2015 [Page 2] Internet-Draft Hackerspace: Internet Message Header August 2014 3. IANA Considerations A new entry is requested in the Permanent Message Header Field Names [TO BE REMOVED: This registry can be found at: http://www.iana.org/ assignments/message-headers/message-headers.xhtml] registry maintained by IANA. The header field name requested is "Hackerspace" and it is applicable to the protocol "mail". 4. Security Considerations Privacy issues may arise as, being a header, most encryption schemes for Internet mail will not encrypt the text. When a message is recieved with a Hackerspace: header, it should not be implicitly trusted as it may have been incorrectly defined by the sender. 5. References [RFC1036] Horton, M. and R. Adams, "Standard for interchange of USENET messages", RFC 1036, December 1987. [RFC2076] Palme, J., "Common Internet Message Headers", RFC 2076, February 1997. [RFC2616] Fielding, R., Gettys, J., Mogul, J., Frystyk, H., Masinter, L., Leach, P., and T. Berners-Lee, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1", RFC 2616, June 1999. Appendix A. Example usage with mutt The first of the following .muttrc statements will add a Hackerspace: header to outgoing mails showing an affiliation with 57North Hacklab and the second statement will unhide the Hackerspace: header when viewing emails in the mutt pager. my_hdr Hackerspace: 57North Hacklab unignore hackerspace Author's Address Learmonth Expires February 12, 2015 [Page 3] Internet-Draft Hackerspace: Internet Message Header August 2014 Iain R. Learmonth University of Aberdeen School of Engineering Kings College Aberdeen AB24 3UE Scotland Email: irl@fsfe.org Learmonth Expires February 12, 2015 [Page 4]