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In particular: RFC:2557 MIME Encapsulation of Aggregate Documents, such as HTML

This is what an IE .MHT file is. As far as I know, no other vendor has added support for this format. (Although, see Mozilla bug 40873 even though it doesn't seem to be going anywhere.)

IMAP and LDAP have provided us with the means to share email and address books, even with proprietary exchange servers.

What we need is more support for standards for shared calendaring too. Email clients which have calendars should be able to send and receive appointments in vCalendar/iCalendar format, and allow the user to accept the appointment.

Beyond that that, they should support iTIP (RFC 2446) for general group scheduling.

Do any opensource projects support this yet? All the open source projects I have looked at develope their own proprietary methods of sharing calendar information.

Correct, because YOU SIGNED UP FOR A LIST! You can also unsubscribe. I subscribed to NO list and it is impossible for me to unsubscribe to the spam. Furthermore, legitimate lists are rather easy to block, since they use legit headers, standard formats and usually, standard subject lines. This ain't the case with spam.

then the act of listening and processing what they say requires energy, which ultimately costs me money

Wrong again. If you want to listen, that is your choice. It does not cost you money to *hear* someone, and you are able to walk away. If you are NOT able to walk away, there are a number of harassment and assault laws which cover the subject. As you stated yourself, you can get a restraining order. Not so for spam.

Spam costs ME money. Someone else is advertising and expecting ME to pay for it. This has been made illegal in every other form (and there have been some very interesting postal fraud cases as a result). The New York State junk fax law is most likable to this situation, where costs to the advertiser are negligible and costs to the recipient are not.

You cannot legitimately and logically defend spam based on its own definition. It isn't spam if I ask for the mail, and I've never, ever asked someone to send me any sort of advertisement. Not even when they've been willing to pay me to read it. How can you logically expect me to bear the costs of advertising your scam?

A couple good links (I'm already karma-capped):
New York Law Journal (Sep. 1997!)
How to use 47 U.S.C. Section 227(b) [Telephone Consumer Protection Act] against junk faxes

woof.

This is not a sig.

The key improvement they made over previous phones seems to be implementing vCard standard for contacts - every name on my phone can have up to four numbers assigned, as well as an email address and postal address.

vCard (and the successor iCard) allows some intelligence when sending data between different systems - rather than relying on hard-coded rules such as "take the first number only," it can extract all X numbers when the receiving system supports them, or only the most important number. For example, you may decide that the home phone number is the "primary" way to reach a contact, and set that as the one which should be transferred to a system which only supports one number.

FWIW, the T39 also comes with a really slick calendar. The calendar uses the vCal standard, so depending on how obscure the transport protocol is, it should be pretty easy for someone to grab the data from the phone via serial/IR/BlueTooth and sync it with a Linux app which supports vCard/vCal.

Point being: Sign everything!

Good idea...verify everything you send, just in case you accidentally (ahem) say anything objectionable. It will make legal proceedings against you so much easier, necessitating hiring one of those evil attorney things.

Unless you have a specific reason to prove that you wrote something, don't sign it.

-l

Please note, before jumping into development of such a server, that the IETF is working on standards for calendaring and scheduling, and several RFCs have already been published. For more info see the ietf-calendar home page.

Unfortunately, I personally know of no open server-side implementation of these standards, though there probably are some. If you know of any, please post here.

Implement these, and the users will come. Do it not, and any project is doomed to play second fiddle to commercial email/PIM systems that will.

iCalendar is described in RFC 2445. What an iCal capable client is, is left to the reader.

Netscape has another standard, called CAP. It's much more recent (March 10, 2000) and hopefully has a better chance at success.

ICAP draft: http://www.ox.org/o x/projects/calendar/draft-oleary-icap-01.txt (There exists a version 4 of this draft, but I've been unable to find it)
CAP Draft: http://www.imc.org/draft-ietf-calsch-cap

Steve Ferris has a Java implementation of ICAP (both client and server) here: http://maelstrom.org.uk/

What about Calendar sharing? I know Outlook has functionality for scheduling meetings and appointments via e-mail. Are there any Open Sourced applications that perform something like this? Would such a thing be difficult to implement?

This file format is very simple:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20000514T140000Z # this is just YYYYMMDD then a "T" as a
DTEND:20000514T150000Z # delimiter and hhmmss (UTC) then a "Z" to end
LOCATION:Conference Room
CATEGORIES:Business
DESCRIPTION:Mr So-and-So will talk about the effects of the...
SUMMARY:Quartely Sales Meeting
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

There already exists a platform-independent calendar sharing standard, and what's more, all the major PIM's (from MS to open-source) are in compliance). Additionally, vCard can be used to share contact information, and they all support that, as well.

What about Calendar sharing? I know Outlook has functionality for scheduling meetings and appointments via e-mail. Are there any Open Sourced applications that perform something like this? Would such a thing be difficult to implement?

This file format is very simple:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20000514T140000Z # this is just YYYYMMDD then a "T" as a
DTEND:20000514T150000Z # delimiter and hhmmss (UTC) then a "Z" to end
LOCATION:Conference Room
CATEGORIES:Business
DESCRIPTION:Mr So-and-So will talk about the effects of the...
SUMMARY:Quartely Sales Meeting
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

There already exists a platform-independent calendar sharing standard, and what's more, all the major PIM's (from MS to open-source) are in compliance). Additionally, vCard can be used to share contact information, and they all support that, as well.

• Outlook's file extension hiding means that the attachment showed as .TXT, not .vbs
• It's a truly bizarre world where viewing a document executes that document.
• That was just this time. Bubbleboy proved that you can make the code launch as soon as the message comes up.
• It doesn't take rocket science. HTML formatted messages render IMG= objects quite promiscuously; VBS is one of the options.

See RFC 2110: MIME E-mail Encapsulation of Aggregate Documents, such as HTML (MHTML) for a description of Microsoft's Web Archive (*.mht) format. Note that Netscape and other programs support this already, they just do not support saving the MIME document as a single file on your system.

The compiled help format is something different.

--

try vCard and vCalendar

try vCard and vCalendar

vCard and vCalendar.

However, POP3 does not an Exchange Server make, in fact most admins don't enable support for it because of bugginess. Exchange users commonly keep mailboxes (with dozens of subfolders including calendar and contact data) on the server. Compare it more with IMAP instead.

The calendar/contact/task data is relatively standardized - dozens of software vendors ship with vCard support in one way or another. The FIPS PUB 98 standard used by Microsoft Mail (yeah, not exchange, I know, but very similar) is a NIST standard, and although available, I can't find it as I write this post. I've looked through it earlier and it's very nondescript (every message must contain a Subject line, a To line, a From line, etc).

The info we need is how this information is accessed. We know it's TCP RPC-based, but anything further will either have to come from Microsoft or be reverse engineered.

That, and the Personal Folders file format would be very useful (we're all itching to find out how they implemented "Compressable Encryption" :)

However, POP3 does not an Exchange Server make, in fact most admins don't enable support for it because of bugginess. Exchange users commonly keep mailboxes (with dozens of subfolders including calendar and contact data) on the server. Compare it more with IMAP instead.

The calendar/contact/task data is relatively standardized - dozens of software vendors ship with vCard support in one way or another. The FIPS PUB 98 standard used by Microsoft Mail (yeah, not exchange, I know, but very similar) is a NIST standard, and although available, I can't find it as I write this post. I've looked through it earlier and it's very nondescript (every message must contain a Subject line, a To line, a From line, etc).

The info we need is how this information is accessed. We know it's TCP RPC-based, but anything further will either have to come from Microsoft or be reverse engineered.

That, and the Personal Folders file format would be very useful (we're all itching to find out how they implemented "Compressable Encryption" :)

He did say that the 'inexpert user trusts the root'. Outlook, of course, puts up a tiny little dialog saying 'do you want to add this root to the certificate store'. Communicator informs the user of the seriousness of what you are about to do. Despite that, this particular point is flawed in other ways - he put E=malda@slashdot.org in the Certificate, but complying implementations (and at least Communicator) will check the Email address in the certificate with that of the recipient, and so would flag this. See the internet mail consortium's page on SMIME

He did say that the 'inexpert user trusts the root'. Outlook, of course, puts up a tiny little dialog saying 'do you want to add this root to the certificate store'. Communicator informs the user of the seriousness of what you are about to do. Despite that, this particular point is flawed in other ways - he put E=malda@slashdot.org in the Certificate, but complying implementations (and at least Communicator) will check the Email address in the certificate with that of the recipient, and so would flag this. See the internet mail consortium's page on SMIME

Currently internet scheduling seems to be guided by commercial interests. The only thing that I've been able to find that shows any advancement is this page. From reading over this, the proposed extensions are more of a way to add internet functionality to existing schedules.

Personally I think that this is the wrong way to go. Personally I think what's needed is a system that similar to email. Imagine being able to subscribe to a scheduling-mailing-list that instead of just sending you an email with this years football games (for example), you can get this information added to your schedule and, given an rights system, updates can automatically be sent to you and you calendar can be updated accordingly.

KOrganizer uses vCalendar natively as its file format. vCalender is an industry-wide open file format with RFCs.

It is supported by many programs (see bottom of page above) including Lotus Notes, Netscape Communicator, Outlook 98, Starfish Sidekick98, and the Palm III uses it to sync up between systems.

VCS is the extension KOrganizer uses, I take it?