Subject: Re: sending comments from reviews

From: Cullen Jennings <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2009 18:42:08 -0600

On May 28, 2009, at 7:56 AM, Jari Arkko wrote:

>
> draft-foo-bar@               Authors (what we have had already)
> draft-foo-bar.authors@       Authors
> draft-foo-bar.chairs@        Chairs (if relevant)
> draft-foo-bar.notify@        Addresses from the email notify field  
> from the tracker
> draft-foo-bar.all@           All of the recipients above and the  
> sponsoring AD
>
> So, review comments etc should most likely be sent to [email-masked] 
>  address to ensure that the comments are seen by not just the  
> authors, but also by the relevant AD, shepherd, and chairs. These  
> addresses are in alpha testing, so if you see a problem or have any  
> other feedback, let us know.
>
> Jari

I get about 20-30 thousand e-mails a month. I read about 15,000 so I  
use a filtering - my filters are lame, there probably a better way to  
filter but I use exchange and that's not easy to change. I am only  
allowed to have a very limited number of filters and what the filters  
can express is pretty limited. These emails will fail to get filtered  
correctly and greatly increase the risk of me not seeing these. I'm  
sure other ADs will be different but the IETF LC instructions are to  
send it to [email-masked] or [email-masked] with the draft name in the  
subject. I'll see those but these will be very hard.

Imagine someone like Hannes that has a ton of drafts, is he supposed  
to create a filter for each draft he writes? How does he separate  
email that was meant to go to him from comments sent on the all the  
other drafts that might go to a list he happens to be subscribed to. I  
think this needs some serious thought about how it interacts with  
people filters. I, like many others, filter stuff into a file per WG.  
If someone sends something to draft-ietf-sip-foo-bar.all@tools, my  
current filters are not going to put in the folder for the SIP WG.  
They are going to leave it with all the spam. I realize that if I had  
a better email system, there might be better ways to filter than what  
is in the To/CC header but I bed the bulk of people that filter to WG  
folders do it on To/CC.

If you got a comment for me as an author, send it to me and/or the WG  
list and it's really nice if it has a good subject line that allows it  
to be found later. If you got a comment for me as an AD, don't send it  
to these.

Cullen

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:58:58 +0200

Cullen,

On 2009-06-02 02:42 Cullen Jennings said the following:
...
> to be found later. If you got a comment for me as an AD, don't send it  

I don't understand.  How does sending a comment to you directly with a
good subject line make things easier than sending it to the draft-foo.all@
alias with a good subject line?  According to my understanding of your
setup, both of these will end up in the same place.

Couldn't you set set up one filter to catch all mail which has a To: which
starts with "draft-", and thus have one place to find all draft comments?

How would this be worse than people sending to you directly?

	Henrik

---

From: Richard Barnes <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:58:24 -0400

Might this be an appropriate use of RSS/atom?  (At least, to copy emails 
over to a feed.)  RSS/atom readers typically segregate articles by feed, 
so if there were one feed per draft (or a collection as suggeted below), 
it would be easy to drop them into, e.g., Google Reader or Thunderbird 
and see when comments came in on any given one.

--Richard

Cullen Jennings wrote:
>> So, review comments etc should most likely be sent to 
>> [email-masked] address to ensure that the comments 
>> are seen by not just the authors, but also by the relevant AD, 
>> shepherd, and chairs. These addresses are in alpha testing, so if you 
>> see a problem or have any other feedback, let us know.
>>
>> Jari
> 
> I get about 20-30 thousand e-mails a month. I read about 15,000 so I use 
> a filtering - my filters are lame, there probably a better way to filter 
> but I use exchange and that's not easy to change. I am only allowed to 
> have a very limited number of filters and what the filters can express 
> is pretty limited. These emails will fail to get filtered correctly and 
> greatly increase the risk of me not seeing these. I'm sure other ADs 
> will be different but the IETF LC instructions are to send it to 
> [email-masked] or [email-masked] with the draft name in the subject. I'll 
> see those but these will be very hard.
> 
> Imagine someone like Hannes that has a ton of drafts, is he supposed to 
> create a filter for each draft he writes? How does he separate email 
> that was meant to go to him from comments sent on the all the other 
> drafts that might go to a list he happens to be subscribed to. I think 
> this needs some serious thought about how it interacts with people 
> filters. I, like many others, filter stuff into a file per WG. If 
> someone sends something to draft-ietf-sip-foo-bar.all@tools, my current 
> filters are not going to put in the folder for the SIP WG. They are 
> going to leave it with all the spam. I realize that if I had a better 
> email system, there might be better ways to filter than what is in the 
> To/CC header but I bed the bulk of people that filter to WG folders do 
> it on To/CC.
>

---

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 07:45:41 -0700

At 9:58 AM -0400 6/2/09, Richard Barnes wrote:
>Might this be an appropriate use of RSS/atom? 

Yes.

>(At least, to copy emails over to a feed.)  RSS/atom readers typically segregate articles by feed, so if there were one feed per draft (or a collection as suggeted below), it would be easy to drop them into, e.g., Google Reader or Thunderbird and see when comments came in on any given one.

Exactly. If nothing else, having a parallel feed for messages will tell Cullen what he missed and that he needs to look in his junk folder.

Wearing my ex-co-chair-of-Atompub-WG hat, this was one of our design goals for Atom. Every announce-style mailing list could be replaced by, or have parallel backup of, an Atom feed.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

---

From: Cullen Jennings <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 09:28:38 -0600

Stuff to [email-masked], I filter to a folder I read. Stuff to rai- 
ads@tools go to folder I read. Stuff to [email-masked] goes to SIP  
folder that I read a bunch of but not all and that I have archived so  
I can find a thread later when it blows up. I'm also subscribed to a  
ton of mailing lists for other areas which I mostly don't read. Take  
for example tsvwg - on rare occasion there is a draft that impacts RAI  
being discussed there so I need the archives. As a side note I find  
the IETF archives/search really bad. So I am subscribed to tsvwg and  
filter that to a folder which I rarely read but I can go and find  
something if I need it. As a random guess, I'd say I need to be  
subscribed to the lists associated with roughly a half of the IETF  
drafts though I am interested in only a small fraction of those. Email  
that does not get filtered to any lists drops into a a folder I scan  
on occasion but seldom look at. My email system will not allow me to  
have a rule that filters on something "draft*sip*".

So consider the above. It used to be that people would email robert,  
or I, or both and use some human intelligence to figure it out.  When  
we started using rai-ads@tools things started to get worse. Now both  
robert and I both get a copy of that email even though typically only  
one of us is dealing with the draft. It's no big deal to hit the  
delete key, everyone on the IESG is really good that but the problem  
happens when I think the other AD has it and they think I have it and  
the ball gets dropped - this happens more often than one might think.  
None the less, the convenience for others sending email to rai-ads  
seemed to outweigh the problems that happened with us receiving at rai- 
ads.

Then people started sending draft-foo@tools. This became pretty hard  
to filter. I notice that many of IESG comments sent to these addresses  
the authors regularly tell me they never saw anything. If I care, I  
send it to the email address of the author. Similarly for a long time  
some RAI chairs were clearly not reading wg-chairs email. I think this  
has been straighter out now and everyone in RAI has adjusted their  
filters accordingly. I set up filters for each WG I am ad for so I can  
get the wg-ads emails. Note that every time we change the ADs for a  
WG, or form a new WG, I have to remember to go adjust my filters which  
I mostly remember to do, but now that I think of it I have forgotten  
to do for the new xmpp wg group.

So now consider review teams sending email to draft-foo.all@tools, I  
can't filter draft-* but even if I could, I would have the reviews for  
a large percentage of the IETF drafts and only a small number of these  
have to do with drafts I need to read. Who knows what archive I might  
search for them in. Basically these emails will fall into the folder  
of emails that were not addressed to me, where not addressed to any  
email lists I am subscribed too. Lots of stuff falls in to that folder  
and I don't read much of it.

So what to do... I've proposed this before but the some people that  
knew much more about email than I felt it was likely the wrong  
approach and that a better way would be to change my filters in a way  
I did not understand, but let me propose it again and people can shoot  
holes in it. Say the authors of a draft like outbound are fluffy@cisco  
and rohan@eckabal. When an email is sent to draft-ietf-sip- 
outbound@tools, when the tools machine sends it on, it replaces the To  
lines with fluffy@cisco and rohan@eckabl. If it is send to ads, the  
tool looks up who the responsible ad is and replaces with their name  
and if the draft does not yet have a responsible ad, then it replaces  
with both ads for the area. Last time I proposed this, smart email  
people did think it was the wrong path and I forget why so certainly  
worth talking about before doing anything. If the data tracker had a  
field to hold the proto shepherd, would be nice to be able to use that  
too.

I'm very open to chaging the way I filter or doing anything that  
works. But I need to be able to be subscribed to lots of mailing WG  
mailing lists for which I am no the AD and I need to be able to have  
stuff that I as AD need to read not get confused with a lots of stuff  
that I don't need to read.

Cullen

---

From: Marc Blanchet <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:36:03 -0400

Cullen Jennings a écrit :
 I'm also subscribed to a ton
> of mailing lists for other areas which I mostly don't read. Take for
> example tsvwg - on rare occasion there is a draft that impacts RAI being
> discussed there so I need the archives. As a side note I find the IETF
> archives/search really bad. So I am subscribed to tsvwg and filter that
> to a folder which I rarely read but I can go and find something if I
> need it. 

I do the same. i.e. I subscribed to many mailing lists "roughly just"
for the purpose of going back into the archives when needed with a good
local search tool.

if IETF mailing lists/archives would be more easily searchable
(available using anonymous IMAP would be good or else), that would save
a lot for many I guess.

a wish...

Marc.
-- 
=========
IPv6 book: Migrating to IPv6, Wiley. http://www.ipv6book.ca
Stun/Turn server for VoIP NAT-FW traversal: http://numb.viagenie.ca
DTN news service: http://reeves.viagenie.ca

---

From: "John G. Scudder" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 12:10:54 -0400

[Speaking of such things, re-sending from my whitelisted address.]

...
> Wearing my ex-co-chair-of-Atompub-WG hat, this was one of our design  
> goals for Atom. Every announce-style mailing list could be replaced  
> by, or have parallel backup of, an Atom feed.

This seems to me to be the most helpful suggestion that's come out of  
this discussion so far.  I would summarize the rest of the discussion  
as "email sucks and is a woefully inappropriate tool for high-volume  
communication and task management, and it's only getting worse."   
Unfortunately.

Rather than trying to figure out which color to paint our email buggy- 
whips and if they need pinstripes, it would seem more productive to  
focus on other kinds of tools such as are discussed above.

--John

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:31:48 +0200

Hi Cullen,

On 2009-06-02 17:28 Cullen Jennings said the following:

...

> have to do with drafts I need to read.

Why would that be?  The draft-foo.all@ addresses would include your
address because you're an AD **only if you are the sponsoring AD**.

(And if you can set up all the other filtering you've described, why
can't you filter on ['To:' starts with 'draft-'] ?  I'm not being
rethorical here; I can add pretty much any particular mail header you
would like for you to filter on, in order to make this work, if only
I understand what the capabilities of you filtering interface is...)

...

> lines with fluffy@cisco and rohan@eckabl.

Nobody has proposed this to me.  I don't see why that would be hard
(although I'm sure this is at odds with principles of what an MTA should
and shouldn't do -- re-writing the To: is in effect to tamper with the
mail, and an MTA shouldn't really do that.  But I think it can be done
without too much trouble, if it is what folks want.)

> If it is send to ads, the  

I believe the shepherd will be added to the notify filed, thus will be
included in the draft-foo.notify@ and draft-foo.all@ addressees.

> that I don't need to read.

Understood.

	Henrik

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:41:25 +0200

Hi John,

> focus on other kinds of tools such as are discussed above.

If you or anybody else in the crowd would write a tool to which I can
pipe an email message and give an argument indicating which alias it
belongs to, where the tool will then update an atom feed appropriately,
I'll be happy to deploy the tool and host the feeds.

I have an IETF tools related TODO list with enough stuff on it for maybe
2 to 5 years of full-time work; the above won't happen particularly soon
if it has to wait for me to find the time to write the tool.

Regards,

	Henrik

---

From: Richard Barnes <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:49:46 -0400

Prototype using Gmail, blogger, and [email-masked]:
Feed: <http://geopriv-at-ietf-dot-org.blogspot.com/>
Blog: <http://geopriv-at-ietf-dot-org.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default>

How it works:
1. <[email-masked]> subscribes to GEOPRIV
2. Gmail filter hits on "[geopriv]" in the subject line
3. Gmail filter forwards to <[email-masked]>
4. Blogger posts email to blog and RSS feed

---

From: Ross Callon <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 13:04:30 -0400

I agree with Cullen here. The amount of email that we get is insane. The easier that we can make it for automated filters to sort the email intelligently the better. 

One other issue that I didn't notice mentioned: Sometimes there are errors in emails embedded in various email exploders. The most common form of this is that the email address for a particular author changes (for example, due to a change in the author's corporate affiliation), and all of the associated email lists are not updated. If emails to the authors are sent such that the email address of each author is visible in the email header, then as AD I have a chance to catch this (and of course co-authors do also). If the email is send to an exploder of some kind, then I can't catch this (and frequently the author doesn't get the email). 

Ross

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Cullen Jennings
Sent: 02 June 2009 11:29
To: Henrik Levkowetz
Cc: Working Group Chairs
Subject: Re: sending comments from reviews

Cullen

---

From: Tony Hansen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:13:34 -0400

I agree with this sentiment. We caught an error just like that a week or
so ago on one of my drafts.

	Tony

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 10:58:04 -0700

> and see when comments came in on any given one.

Yes!   :')

---

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:56:07 +0300

Ross,

> One other issue that I didn't notice mentioned: Sometimes there are errors in emails embedded in various email exploders. The most common form of this is that the email address for a particular aut…

That was actually one of the original reasons for creating and using the 
[email-masked] addresses. When I write a mail to someone and 
manually set the addresses, my mail tool often offers up to six 
different e-mail addresses for a particular person. I have trouble 
remembering which one of those is the most recent one. The tools 
addresses are automatically generated from drafts, and generally up to 
date (at least to within the few months that draft versions live). There 
are exceptions of course. For the same reason I use 
[email-masked] rather than send mail directly to chairs. 
There's one place in the IETF system that needs to change (by the 
chair's action) when their e-mail address changes, and the rest of us 
can use a stable identifier.

FWIW, I a reasonably happy user of the addresses. And I seem to be able 
to set filters so that I get what I want, most of the time. Of course, I 
may be biased since some of the data for these addresses comes from my 
toolset and I like eating my own dogfood :-) I remember the time when we 
did not have these addresses, and the tracker sent updates to a list 
that was manually entered by the ADs. Unfortunately that list was very 
inaccurate; several ADs forgot to update it or even set it altogether. 
So if I sent a Discuss it was never received by the authors or WG chairs.

By the way, the tracker e-mail list is still fully editable by the ADs. 
If you don't trust the defaults, set your own list.

My general point is that its hard to create a perfect system for this. 
If we make it easier to send to these addresses, the receivers will have 
to do extra work for filters. If the receivers get personalized e-mail, 
the senders may err by using old addresses, won't bother to send to 
everyone, etc. If we put the ADs in charge of setting up e-mail lists 
they never bother doing it. If we use atom feeds there's going to be 
some poor soul whose corporate software doesn't support it. And so on.

I'm very interested in Cullen's To-field edit idea though. I'm sure our 
e-mail experts on the list will tell us whether its workable. Is it?

Jari

---

From: Pete Resnick <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 14:08:04 -0500

On 6/2/09 at 6:31 PM +0200, Henrik Levkowetz wrote:

>>approach and that a better way would be to change my filters in a 
>>way I did not understand, but let me propose it again and people 
>>can shoot holes in it. Say the authors of a draft like outbound are 
>>fluffy@cisco and rohan@eckabal. When an email is sent to 
>>draft-ietf-sip- outbound@tools, when the tools machine sends it on, 
>>it replaces the To lines with fluffy@cisco and rohan@eckabl.
>
>(although I'm sure this is at odds with principles of what an MTA 
>should and shouldn't do -- re-writing the To: is in effect to tamper 
>with the mail, and an MTA shouldn't really do that. But I think it 
>can be done without too much trouble, if it is what folks want.)

The more "correct" way to do this is to add a "Resent-To:" field to 
the message and put the addresses in there. Then Cullen can filter on 
"To:" or "Resent-To:" and the right thing could happen. Rewriting the 
"To:" is bad because you're going to lose information, but adding a 
"Resent-To:" is perfectly reasonable.

pr
-- 
Pete Resnick <http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102

---

From: "Dan Wing" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 15:48:04 -0700

Would adding "[email-masked]" to the CC header solve the problem?

-d

> From: [email-masked] 
> [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Cullen Jennings
> Sent: Tuesday, June 02, 2009 8:29 AM
> To: Henrik Levkowetz
> Cc: Working Group Chairs
> >> list and it's really nice if it has a good subject line 
> that allows  
> >> it
> >> to be found later. If you got a comment for me as an AD, 
> don't send  
> >> it
> >> to these.
> >
> > Couldn't you set set up one filter to catch all mail which 
> has a To:  
> > which

---

From: Eric Burger <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 21:43:09 -0400

+1000000!!!!!

Google / IETF Search does not cut it. The archive Web interface is  
just about unusable. Biggest thing I'm missing is sensible threaded  
results. Searching (not just viewing) by subject, sender, or content  
would be great. *Not* getting search results from other lists would be  
huge.

---

From: Dean Willis <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 00:11:39 -0500

> Would adding "[email-masked]" to the CC header solve the problem?

Probably not, at least not without requiring a doubled rule set; one  
for cc, one for to.

I personally filter using ^TO_ recipes in procmail.

I don't have a filter on ^TO_draft*, so those messages hit my main  
inbox, which is probably the right place for them to be. But I could  
easily shove them into another mailbox with another filter recipe.

--
Dean

---

From: "Dan Wing" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 22:44:10 -0700

> easily shove them into another mailbox with another filter recipe.

Yes, so you have a robust filter set (read: not Exchange).  With that,
you could filter draft* however you like, including such that if the
mail had a Received: header indicating tools.ietf.org expansion it
could go into a certain folder -- even though it contained your
email address in the CC: (or even in the To:).

Wish I had procmail.  I miss it.

But for those with inept filter sets (read: Exchange), would putting
the email address in the CC (or To, if that is essential to the
discussion) be sufficient?

-d

---

From: Stewart Bryant <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:13:59 +0100

+2^128

I have long thought that the inability to effectively search and review the
mail archives was a was a major deficiency with the IETF doc system.

I also have a personal archive mail for just this reason.

Stewart

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:25:28 +0200

> "Resent-To:" is perfectly reasonable.

Ok.  I'm now adding a "Resent-To:" header with the expanded addressee
list to the messages to [email-masked].

If/when there is a clear indication that adding the expansion to either
"To:" or "Cc:" is useful and desirable, I'll do so too.  (If so, should
it be accompanied by adding a reply-to header specifying the draft-*
alias and the original sender, in order to avoid everyone on the expanded
list receives two copies of reply-to-all followups?)

Best,

	Henrik

---

From: Marshall Eubanks <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 05:26:53 -0400

On Jun 2, 2009, at 9:43 PM, Eric Burger wrote:

> would be great. *Not* getting search results from other lists would  
> be huge.

What should the IAOC do to improve searchability of IETF mail list  
archives ?

Is there another package or system in use (NANOG/RIPE/ITU/etc) that is  
substantially better ?

Regards
Marshall

---

From: Eric Burger <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 05:55:21 -0400

To be honest, I do not know what's out there. If anything, look at the  
interface provided by Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Eudora, or Outlook.

I could be parochial and say we should have everything on an IMAP  
server and use Alexey's super-duper IMAP search protocols, but I  
hopefully will be well retired by then :-)

On Jun 3, 2009, at 5:26 AM, Marshall Eubanks wrote:

>> results. Searching (not just viewing) by subject, sender, or  
>> content would be great. *Not* getting search results from other  
>> lists would be huge.
>
> Is there another package or system in use (NANOG/RIPE/ITU/etc) that  
> is substantially better ?
>
> Regards
> Marshall
>
>
>>
>>

---

From: "Martin J. Dürst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:57:09 +0900

On 2009/06/03 10:43, Eric Burger wrote:
> +1000000!!!!!
>
> Google / IETF Search does not cut it. The archive Web interface is just
> about unusable. Biggest thing I'm missing is sensible threaded results.
> Searching (not just viewing) by subject, sender, or content would be
> great. *Not* getting search results from other lists would be huge.

And while we are at it, the ability to search something by time slot 
(rather than just hitting the next button or doing some binary search 
guessing game). And exchanging "Previous" and "Next", because I guess 
for most people, next is the future, and previous is the past, but the 
Web archive has it backwards.

Regards,    Martin.

-- 
#-# Martin J. Dürst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp   mailto:[email-masked]

---

From: "DRAGE, Keith (Keith)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 12:05:22 +0200

Given the number of different places that people do comment to, there will need to be a responsibility for someone to forward messages into the appropriate feed.

Once documents get to publication request, we see comments against the document coming to IETF list, WG mailing list, any of the combinations of the tools lists Henrik has identified, direct to authors listed in the draft, and some more beside. Getting all these into a single feed will not happen just by the senders being well behaved.

Keith

> [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Ted Lemon
> Sent: Tuesday, June 02, 2009 6:58 PM
> To: Richard Barnes
> Cc: Cullen Jennings; Working Group Chairs
> > Might this be an appropriate use of RSS/atom?  (At least, to copy 
> > emails over to a feed.)  RSS/atom readers typically 
> segregate articles 
> > by feed, so if there were one feed per draft (or a collection as 
> > suggeted below), it would be easy to drop them into, e.g., Google 
> > Reader or Thunderbird and see when comments came in on any 
> given one.
> 
> Yes!   :')
> 
>

---

From: "Martin J. Dürst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:58:31 +0900

The W3C 'package' is substantially better. Please have a look at 
http://lists.w3.org. It's not perfect, in particular, the archives are 
cut into time slices (a month, a quarter, or so), and there are no 
threading links across slice boundaries.

Also, what W3C uses is not a single package, but several packages and 
some home-grown stuff.

Regards,    Martin.

---

From: Marc Blanchet <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:33:01 -0400

> What should the IAOC do to improve searchability of IETF mail list

As I wrote below, one way is anonymous IMAP. people then use their
preferred email client to do whatever search.

Marc.

---

From: Alexey Melnikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:14:48 +0100

>preferred email client to do whatever search.
+1.

---

From: Alexey Melnikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:19:25 +0100

Eric Burger wrote:

> To be honest, I do not know what's out there. If anything, look at 
> the  interface provided by Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Eudora, or Outlook.
>

I hope you are not implying that it would take so long to get this done ;-).

-- 
IETF Application Area Director, <http://www.ietf.org/IESGmems.html>
Internet Messaging Team Lead, <http://www.isode.com>
JID: same as my email address

---

From: Richard Barnes <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:03:11 -0400

+1

---

From: Bill Fenner <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 09:31:50 -0400

On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 5:26 AM, Marshall Eubanks <[email-masked]> wrote:
> What should the IAOC do to improve searchability of IETF mail list archives
> ?
>

I used "lurker" on rtg.ietf.org (before the wheels fell off and it
dove into the ground), and found it very useful: decent search, very
nice thread following, very easy to use to find and follow old
threads.  I tried to evangelize it but never really came to consensus
about changing what NSS was doing.

Here's a live installation of lurker to play with its features:

http://archives.free.net.ph/splash/index.html

  Bill

---

From: Ross Callon <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 10:31:11 -0400

> What should the IAOC do to improve searchability of IETF mail list  

To me the top two (closely related) improvements that are needed are:

  1. Be able to easily find in one place all emails resulting from the 
     IETF last call on a particular document. 

  2. Be able to easily find in one place all emails related to a
     particular document. 

Ross

---

From: Yaakov Stein <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 18:13:23 +0300

Ross, 

[YJS] that one is probably rather easy as the draft name will almost always be in the subject line.

[YJS] but that can be difficult as frequently discussions pertaining to a document
do not contain the document title in the subject line.
This is because threads often revolve around either very specific subtopics
(Re: the new foo mechanism)
or very general questions that impact several documents
(Re: how foo problems should be handled in all of our documents).

---

From: Pete Resnick <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 10:32:56 -0500

>>preferred email client to do whatever search.

Dogfood! Yum! (+1)

I've talked with secretariat folks about installing an IMAP front-end 
on the mailing list archives. They seemed positive about the idea, 
but it hasn't bubbled to the top of the list. I think it would be 
ideal. It would also make me instantly unsubscribe from every IETF 
mailing list; I'd just read them via IMAP. All of the search and sort 
functions come for free with IMAP.

pr

---

From: Dean Willis <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 12:38:55 -0500

On Jun 3, 2009, at 10:32 AM, Pete Resnick wrote:
>
>
> I've talked with secretariat folks about installing an IMAP front- 
> end on the mailing list archives. They seemed positive about the  
> idea, but it hasn't bubbled to the top of the list. I think it would  
> be ideal. It would also make me instantly unsubscribe from every  
> IETF mailing list; I'd just read them via IMAP. All of the search  
> and sort functions come for free with IMAP.
>

I dunno. On my IMAP server, I have to segregate collections by year  
and working group. That makes the threading and other search  
structures a bit less useful.

Initially I segregated just by working group. However, the bigger WGs,  
like SIP, produced such a large mail volume that after about four  
years both my client and server started choking. Ten years of SIP  
messages would make for a really big index file, but yearly chunks are  
fairly manageable.

This sounds much more like a Google problem: bunch up the archives,  
use Map-Reduce customizations to build up the complex linkage  
structure people seem to be asking for, and farm out the indexing work.

Also, keep in mind that queries against the result are going to eat up  
a lot of server CPU time. We don't have much cost from that given the  
minimal capability of the existing system, but I can see needing a ten- 
server farm to keep up with the questions people want to ask our  
archive, especially during pre-and-meeting peaks.

Maybe some of our Google friends would like to launch a research  
effort here.

--
Dean

---

From: Alexey Melnikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:57:04 +0100

Dean Willis wrote:

> and working group.

This is reasonable.

> That makes the threading and other search  structures a bit less useful.

How frequently do you have threads running across multiple years? I 
don't think it is frequent.
And when searching, one can open each mailbox and search there. I don't 
think this is a big deal.

> Initially I segregated just by working group. However, the bigger 
> WGs,  like SIP, produced such a large mail volume that after about 
> four  years both my client and server started choking. Ten years of 
> SIP  messages would make for a really big index file, but yearly 
> chunks are  fairly manageable.
>
> Also, keep in mind that queries against the result are going to eat 
> up  a lot of server CPU time. We don't have much cost from that given 
> the  minimal capability of the existing system, but I can see needing 
> a ten- server farm to keep up with the questions people want to ask 
> our  archive, especially during pre-and-meeting peaks.

That maybe so, but we wouldn't know until we try.
Besides some servers can build search indexes. Which should help.

> Maybe some of our Google friends would like to launch a research  

Sure thing.

---

From: Marc Blanchet <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:37:41 -0400

Dean Willis a écrit :

> Also, keep in mind that queries against the result are going to eat up a
> lot of server CPU time. We don't have much cost from that given the
> minimal capability of the existing system, but I can see needing a
> ten-server farm to keep up with the questions people want to ask our

you are right. imap with thousands of users with thousands of large
folders would require a large farm.

> 
> Maybe some of our Google friends would like to launch a research effort
> here.

agree. if someone can improve the searching capabilities of ietf mailing
lists, that would be great... maybe someone's 20% project.

Marc.

---

From: Alexey Melnikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:16:37 +0100

>folders would require a large farm.
Are you sure?
My deployment experience says that a single Dual Core Intel box with 
enough memory can handle this easily.
This of course depends on the server being used.

---

From: Marc Blanchet <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:23:45 -0400

>> folders would require a large farm.

well, as Dean wrote, I've also experienced slowing down very much both
client and server with large number of large imap folders.

> This of course depends on the server being used.

of course, it depends on the server (and the client: some clients
sometimes just want to cache everything they see in XML...)

Anyway. again, I suggested anonymous IMAP as one possible solution to
the problem.

marc.

---

From: Alexey Melnikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:29:35 +0100

>client and server with large number of large imap folders.
I don't think server side is a problem.

I agree that various clients have issues with big mailboxes. But you 
need to get into ten of thousands of messages.

Alexey,
Who uses Thunderbird and has 30,000 messages in his INBOX as of this moment.

---

From: Suresh Krishnan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:50:53 -0400

Hi Marc,
    It may not solve all your problems, but the IETF mailing list search 
tool developed  by Lars and Jari has been very helpful. You can find it at

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=006728497408158459967%3Aybxjdw-bjjw

Cheers
Suresh

---

From: Lars Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2009 11:27:21 +0200

> http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=006728497408158459967%3Aybxjdw-bjjw

Note that folks have reported that the search results aren't complete  
(i.e. results are missing for some queries).

Jari and me have zero options for debugging this, because Google  
Custom Search doesn't have any interface for doing so. I have  
confirmed that the pattern that is matching the queried emails is  
configured, but the results simply don't show.

Lars

---

From: Lars Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2009 11:46:32 +0200

(BCC'ed to [email-masked].)

On 2009-5-28, at 15:56, Jari Arkko wrote:
> 1. The Note field in the IESG agendas will contain the shepherd's  
> name.
> This has not been the case today for most documents. From now on, the
> secretary will fill in the field upon receiving a publication request.

I note that this is not yet happening for documents that were  
publication-requested in the last few days. What's the holdup?

Lars

---

From: Dean Willis <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2009 17:44:57 -0500

> don't think it is frequent.

Hah! SIP had some working-group last calls split across three years.   
Conversations spanning  single calendar-year transitions happened  
frequently. Admittedly, humans could work around this, but it would be  
neat if they didn't have to.

--
Dean

---

From: Dean Willis <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2009 17:53:49 -0500

> This of course depends on the server being used.

A few years back, one of our larger backbone providers decided to  
suddenly become a "large consumer ISP" very rapidly. As I recall, we  
configured one SparcServer 2000 for each 10,000 users. But that was  
based on a 1MB queue per user, and mixed POP and IMAP access. POP  
takes a lot less CPU.

I'm running my mail server on a 1GHz Celeron with 1GB RAM, and it gets  
fairly loaded down with just me using it. I may have 10GB of IMAP  
folders online, but I'm not at all sure it could run 10 simultaneous  
users. Say a quad-Xeon with 16GB ram is 20 times as fast; I'm not sure  
it could handle 200 users on really big folders.

However, given that there aren't that many folders -- multiply by the  
number of working groups, not the number of users --  perhaps the  
gains from indexing efficiency would really pay off.

--
Dean

---

From: "DRAGE, Keith (Keith)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 11:12:35 +0200

I was looking for one but all the really long lasting one seem to have been interrupted by a publication request, and then a long time with the IESG as well. I could manage 2 and half calender years in WGLC and still growing.

As regards the search requirements I have two needs:

-	Do a search on a single list for all messages relating to one draft (that includes the draft name or some subset of it within the text but not necessarily within the title). This is to make sure I have not missed any of the discussion when doing the proto writeup, but also at the point of ensuring all issues are closed and so on.

-	Do a search across multiple lists when checking for comments during Publication request, IETF last call and IESG review for all messages relating to one draft (that includes the draft name or some subset of it within the text but not necessarily within the title). And some of these cross multiple year boundaries as well. In particular this one has to include the ietf discuss list, and any lists that may get used by review bodies.

Keith

> [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Dean Willis
> Sent: Thursday, June 04, 2009 11:45 PM
> To: Alexey Melnikov
> Cc: Working Group Chairs
> Subject: Re: mailing lists archives searchable.
> 
> 
> Conversations spanning  single calendar-year transitions 
> happened frequently. Admittedly, humans could work around 
> this, but it would be neat if they didn't have to.
> 
> --
> Dean
> 
>

---

From: "Ersue, Mehmet (NSN - DE/Munich)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 11:12:40 +0200

> [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of ext Alexey Melnikov
> Sent: Wednesday, June 03, 2009 2:15 PM
> To: Marshall Eubanks
> Cc: Working Group Chairs

+10

---

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:53:41 +0300

>
> -	Do a search across multiple lists when checking for comments during Publication request, IETF last call and IESG review for all messages relating to one draft (that includes the draft name or some subset of it within the text but not necessarily within the title).

I'd like to have that, maybe even extended a bit. Search across all 
archives, all working group mailing lists (some drafts are discussed on 
several), directorate mailing lists, tracker events, RFC editor state 
changes, even IESG discussion and perhaps minutes of various meetings. 
I'm not sure if all directorate lists are open, but we recently opened 
some at least, and I don't see why the IESG archives for, say, 
^((DISCUSS)|(COMMENT)).*draft-foo Subject lines couldn't be open.

The actual search can obviously be implemented in various ways and then 
delivered to the reader in yet another set of ways. I'll note that the 
number of drafts is finite and you wouldn't necessarily need to search 
the whole IETF every time you do a query -- pre-processing entries to 
buckets for each draft would be possible.

Jari

---

From: Cullen Jennings <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 09:06:41 -0600

> address because you're an AD **only if you are the sponsoring AD**.

agree but ... for the drafts where the tracker address includes the WG  
address. Then a copy goes to the WG and if I'm subscribed to some  
other AD WG lists, then I get them and a filter that match draft- 
*.all@ matches them to the wrong folder. Perhaps the solution to this  
is to make it so the tracker notify lists never contain the WG but  
many folks were trying to move to not leaving the WG in the dark as  
much about the black hole that drafts enter after pub request.

---

From: Cullen Jennings <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 09:07:41 -0600

> Would adding "[email-masked]" to the CC header solve the problem?

yes

---

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:15:59 +0300

Cullen,

> for the drafts where the tracker address includes the WG address

Have you seen many of these? I usually do not include the WG in the 
tracker notification list, and expect there to be a human in the loop 
(ADs, shepherds and authors) who process information and make more 
high-level announcements to the WG. Granted, those humans tend to be 
forgetful. But mindless copying of lot of administrative messaging is 
also bad.

Anyway that's been my model. It might be that there are other, better 
models.

Jari

---

From: "DRAGE, Keith (Keith)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 17:21:03 +0200

Yep, I think the direction is to get the quality of the information in the tracker up, rather than send all the tracker changes to the list.

Once that has occurred, the WG chair or proto shepherd can either direct the WG members to the tracker, or summarise the issue. For many drafts at the moment there is little point in doing this, because the tracker doesn't contain the information. And the WG chair or proto shepherd is no better off because they can't find the information to summarise either.

(Note that I am not excluding here the tracker information just being a link elsewhere).

Keith

> [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Jari Arkko
> Sent: Friday, June 05, 2009 4:16 PM
> To: Cullen Jennings
> Cc: Working Group Chairs; Henrik Levkowetz
> Have you seen many of these? I usually do not include the WG 
> in the tracker notification list, and expect there to be a 
> human in the loop (ADs, shepherds and authors) who process 
> information and make more high-level announcements to the WG. 
> Granted, those humans tend to be forgetful. But mindless 
> copying of lot of administrative messaging is also bad.
> 
> Anyway that's been my model. It might be that there are 
> other, better models.
> 
> Jari
> 
>

---

From: Stig Venaas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:55:51 -0700

+1, I've also been thinking of anonymous IMAP as a solution. I played
around with that for some other archives like 10 years ago...

Stig

---

From: Cullen Jennings <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 12:05:08 -0600

As far as I can tell, exchange can not filter on the Resent-To but I  
agree that sounds like the right thing to do. Perhaps this will  
eventually motivate me to get to better email tools.

---

From: Dean Willis <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2009 00:15:47 -0500

On Jun 5, 2009, at 10:06 AM, Cullen Jennings wrote:

> agree but ... for the drafts where the tracker address includes the  
> WG address. Then a copy goes to the WG and if I'm subscribed to some  
> *.all@ matches them to the wrong folder. Perhaps the solution to  
> this is to make it so the tracker notify lists never contain the WG  
> but many folks were trying to move to not leaving the WG in the dark  
> as much about the black hole that drafts enter after pub request.
>
>

BCC the WG.

--
Dean

---

From: Cullen Jennings <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2009 14:25:23 -0600

> > as much about the black hole that drafts enter after pub request.

I feel sort of silly - that had not occurred to me. But that would do  
it.