Network Working Group N. Ravishankar Internet-Draft Microsoft India (R&D) Intended status: BCP March 28, 2009 Expires: September 30, 2009 Defines Message media sub-type 'Disclaimer' to organize and handle Disclaimers in Email messages effectively draft-nandagopalan-disclaimer-00 Status of this Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted to IETF in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. This document may contain material from IETF Documents or IETF Contributions published or made publicly available before November 10, 2008. The person(s) controlling the copyright in some of this material may not have granted the IETF Trust the right to allow modifications of such material outside the IETF Standards Process. Without obtaining an adequate license from the person(s) controlling the copyright in such materials, this document may not be modified outside the IETF Standards Process, and derivative works of it may not be created outside the IETF Standards Process, except to format it for publication as an RFC or to translate it into languages other than English. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet- Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt. The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. This Internet-Draft will expire on September 10, 2009. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2009 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents in effect on the date of publication of this document (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info). Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Ravishankar Expires September 10, 2009 [Page 1] Internet-Draft Defines Media subtype 'Disclaimer' March 2009 Abstract This memo defines a new media subtype of Disclaimer to the media type 'Message'. Disclaimers are being used as a legal and commercial message that is intended to protect the interest of the sender and the recipient. At present form the disclaimers are messy to handle with multiple appends to an Email message conversation, making the Email bulky and difficult comprehend. Table of Contents: 1.Email exchange logic assumed.........................................................3 1.1 Initiation phase......................................................................................3 1.1Reply/Acknowledgement phase.............................................................3 1.2Conversation phase................................................................................3 2. Scenarios covered........................................................................................3 2.1 Intra-domain exchange.........................................................................3 2.2 Inter-domain conversation..................................................................3 3. Parameters....................................................................................................4 3.1 Disclaiming Domain (DD)....................................................................4 3.2 Disclaiming Action (DA).......................................................................4 3.3 Department Identification...................................................................4 3.4 Boundary.................................................................................................4 4. Example.........................................................................................................5 5. Encoding consideration.............................................................................6 6. Security considerations.............................................................................6 7. IANA considerations...................................................................................6 8. Normative reference...................................................................................6 Author address.................................................................................................6 The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 Ravishankar Expires September 10, 2009 [Page 2] Internet-Draft Defines Media subtype 'Disclaimer' March 2009 1. Email exchange logic assumed There are various mail exchange phases in which the Disclaimers can be added and they are briefed below: 1.1 Initiation phase: In this phase a sender initiates an email message conversation to a inter-org or intra-org recipient and the sender's mail server append/prepend the disclaimer, initiating the cycle. 1.2 Reply/Acknowledgement phase: In this phase, the recipient in the Initiation phase swaps roles and replies to the message. The mail server of the sender again append/prepend the disclaimer to the mail, which already has a disclaimer in it. Most of the conversations end in this phase, but the exchange continues to the next phase as well. 1.3 Conversation phase: In this phase the roles are swapped again and Sender sends a reply, converting the mail exchange to a complete conversation, which can be terminated at any point at will by either the sending or the receiving party. In this phase to avoid re-addition of the disclaimer, the 'Disclaiming domain' parameter will be used to check if the message already has the disclaimer from the domain, if so, will skip the mail from the disclaimer attachment process. 2.Scenarios covered This media sub-type can cover the following scenarios, which are not exhaustive. 2.1 Intra-domain exchange: Email message conversation that happens between users in same SMTP domain space, but in different entities, that disclaim only for themselves. 2.2 Inter-domain conversation: Email conversations that happen between two different SMTP namespace, this is the usual scenario in which the mails are exchanges between two separate organizations, which disclaim. Ravishankar Expires September 10, 2009 [Page 3] Internet-Draft Defines Media subtype 'Disclaimer' March 2009 3. Parameters Content-type: message/disclaimer Parameters This sub-type is intended to handle disclaimers as integral but isolated part of Email message body. The parameters for this subtype are: 3.1 Disclaiming domain (DD). 3.2 Disclaimer Action (DA). - Optional 3.3 Department Identification (DID). - Optional 3.4 Boundary 3.1 Disclaiming domain (DD): This parameter required to indicate the domain that owns the disclaimer and the value of the parameter would contain the SMTP name of the domain that is sending the message which is after '@' separator in the email address of the sender. Example: Sender - user@corp.domain.com then DD would be 'corp.domain.com' 3.2 Disclaimer Action (DA): This optional parameter defines whether a disclaimer should be 'appended' or 'pre-pended'. The default value for this parameter would be 'append'. If left unspecified or if the parameter is omitted, the default action would be to append the disclaimer. 3.3 Department Identification (DID): This recommended parameter is intended to be used in the scenarios where different disclaiming entities share the same SMTP namespace. The value of this parameter needs to be unique in a SMTP domain and should only be minimum 1 character to a maximum of 8 characters long. 3.4 Boundary: This parameter is required to specify the boundary of the Disclaimer message data and follows the same norms as defined in the RFC 2045 and RFC 2046. The content of the Disclaimer will be handled like a normal message body inside the disclaimer boundary. So the disclaimers can contain text, jpeg files and other media types as necessary. Ravishankar Expires September 10, 2009 [Page 4] Internet-Draft Defines Media subtype 'Disclaimer' March 2009 4. Example Below is an example that shows the usage. Content-Type: Message/Disclaimer; Disclaiming-Domain= Microsoft.com; Disclaimer-Action: Prepend; Department-Identification= Finance; boundary="--sample boundary" ----sample boundary Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="--first boundary" This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ----first boundary Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="--second boundary" ----second boundary Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable ----second boundary Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable --second boundary-- --first boundary-- --sample boundary-- In simple terms, the disclaimer media subtype is intended to sanitize the handling of message disclaimer and avoid duplicates and organize them in a better way as advancements in Email clients and server demand in clear as well as rich messages that catches the attention of the reader. Disclaimer content apart from its purpose/usage it is simply an extension of message body and has all the properties and norms of a message body. Ravishankar Expires September 10, 2009 [Page 5] Internet-Draft Defines Media subtype 'Disclaimer' March 2009 5. Encoding consideration All the encoding defined in RFC 2045 for the message body can be used for Disclaimer content as well, as disclaimer is just treated as an isolated part of the message body. 6. Security consideration Disclaimers can contain all the media types that are defined for a message body and hence the security consideration outlined in the RFC of the media list given in http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/ will apply. 7. IANA Considerations This document defines the 'Disclaimer' media subtype for the 'message' media type. Registration in the standards tree 8. Normative references [RFC 2046] Freed, N., Borenstein, N., "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part Two: Media Types", RFC 2046, November 1996. [RFC 2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997 Author's address Ravishankar Nandagopalan Microsoft (R&D), Embassy Golf Links Business park, Domlur, Bangalore - 560071 Karnataka, India Email: ravisn@microsoft.com Ravishankar Expires September 10, 2009 [Page 6]