Policy-Mandated Labels Such as "Adv:" in Email Subject Headers Considered Ineffective At Best
draft-malamud-subject-line-05

Comments from the Ops directorate by Pekka Savola (Mar 30 17:47:13 PST 2005):

Seems like a useful document.  I'm personally a bit dubious whether
the solicitation class keywords approach has been sufficiently
explored yet to know if it has issues or not.. but I guess we'll just
have to see.

(Also see draft-malamud-keyword-discovery-03.txt)
A particular concern, possibly to be addressed in a different
document, is the assumption that the users are able to insert properly
formatted and correct solicitation keywords in the message, which can
be sanely parsed by a computer.  Effectively, this allows anyone to
perform a DoS on someone else's resources (assuming specifying
something like net.example.adv would result in everyone going and
taking a look at "adv" policy at example.net -- then flooding
example.net).  A maliscious advertiser could also insert improperly
formatted keywords, or insert 100 such keywords which will time out,
consuming even more processing than receiving the message would have
done.

editorial:
 - in Abstract, s/Internet-Draft/memo/ also elsewhere in the draft
 - remove the 'Terminology' section and the SHOULD in section 6, it
   does not belong to an Informational RFC like this.