[Design] Attaching policy metadata to mail messages

[Daniel Weitzner]

How about enabling mail creators to attach a bit of policy-oriented metadata
to each message: copyright license terms, forwarding limitations, archive
status, etc. Today people put all sorts of caveats into their .sig files
(this message confidential, don't forward, copyright Joe Blow, etc.) but
mail clients can't take any action on all of these statements because
there's no machine-readable vocabulary with which to express them.

We're probably all been in a situation where we're inadvertently forwarded
mail that the sender hoped would be kept private, or had our own mail used
in ways that we would have like to preclude. I'd like to see the client help
creators to express these preferences and help recipients to respect those
preferences. A little bit of message metadata would go a long way. One other
immediate application this would enable is the association of Creative
Commons license terms with mail messages.

I'd like to see a simple way to attach policy (or other) metadata to
messages either through a simply URI that points to a policy statement (in
RDF) or something more tightly integrated. Defining the various vocabularies
is a lot of work and it should probably go on somewhere outside of this
effort, but simply providing hooks with which to attach a bit of RDF and
some way to specify actions would be really nice.

This whole project is quite exciting. Thanks to all who have gotten it
going.

--
Daniel J. Weitzner                              +1.617.253.8036 (MIT)
World Wide Web Consortium                       +1.202.364.4750 (DC)
Technology & Society Domain Leader              <djweitzner@w3.org>
http://www.w3.org/People/Weitzner.html