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Network Working Group D. Crocker Request for Comments: 577 UCLA-NMC NIC: 19356 October 1973 References: RFC 524, 539, 555

                           Mail Priority

 In RFC 539 (NIC--17644,3d:gy) Postel and I suggested that mail
 senders be allowed to assign a degree of priority to their mail.
 White (RFC 555--17993,6c:gy) objected to defining shades of urgency,
 without having their effects upon the Mail Protocol server also
 defined.

 If priority levels were to be assigned by automata, I would agree
 with Jim.  Unfortunately, the human sender of the mail will usually
 be the one to assign the priority, and humans will not be consistent
 in that assignment.

 Also unfortunately, the concept of urgency is an integral part of
 communication.  If it weren't, we could ignore its inclusion into the
 MP.

 Since distinctions in urgency are useful (necessary?) and since
 humans will be the ones assigning specific degrees of urgency
 (thereby making it impossible for server processes to automatically
 do the "right thing" in response), we suggested only including the
 INFORMATION as part of the protocol.  Let the human and server-
 process receivers decide between themselves how the server-process
 should deal with that information.

 Now that I have argued all that, let me suggest interpretations for
 urgency values.  This is so that programmers can have automata-
 generated mail (e.g., notification of the status of previously sent
 mail) carry reasonable urgency values:

    10  Phone in the middle of the night, if necessary.
     9
     8  Deliver to user's terminal NOW.
     7
     6  Deliver to user's terminal only if user is at "exec"
        level.
     5
     4  Deliver immediately after sign-on or before sign-off.
     3
     2  Deliver into standard mailbox.
     1
     0  Junk Mail

Crocker [Page 1]  RFC 577 Mail Priority October 1973

       [ This RFC was put into machine readable form for entry ]
       [ into the online RFC archives by  Martin Lyngvig 7/99 ]

Crocker [Page 2]