mail-address-semantics/SCOPE.md

SCOPE

One-liner

Reference implementation and spec workbench for Mail Address Semantics (MAS), and the email building block for a future multimodal communication framework. Contents: parser, statute discovery, pure policy, generator, CLI, mail gateway, reference ticket service, a tested Postfix integration profile, and the mode contract with an email side that works as master or slave. It implements address spec v0.1.1, the v0.2 draft and mode contract v0.1 (draft).

Core Idea

Test whether ordinary email addresses can carry limited, parseable semantics (opaque targets, type=id resources, + facets, ! interaction preferences) through real mail infrastructure, without changing SMTP and without making addresses credentials or commands (INTENT.md). The architectural boundary is fixed: the parser does no I/O, policy is pure, only mas_core/discovery.py touches the network, and delivery stays external.

In Scope

• Normative bundles. mas-v0.1-spec/ (v0.1.1 errata) and mas-v0.2-spec/ (draft: stand-ins, destination transforms, resource_id_case). Spec changes go through docs/spec-change-proposals.md.
• mas_core. Parser, model, statute validation and lint, exact-host discovery with explicit inherits, policy, and the generator with v0.2 destination transforms.
• mas_conformance. Address, property, statute and v0.2 statute-aware corpora, vendored unchanged from the bundles and checked for drift.
• mas CLI. parse, explain, discover, compose, lint-statute, test.
• mas_gateway. MTA pipe and provider-style webhook to a normalized HTTP event. It reads sender authentication only from trusted Authentication-Results.
• Examples. A static statute and the reference ticket service: create, correlate by address, closed lifecycle, quarantine, a DMARC-gated reply, and a lifetime send cap.
• MTA integration. integrations/postfix/ (profile plus README), tested against a real Postfix by experiments/postfix-probe/ and tests/test_postfix_profile.py (needs Docker). Exim: notes only (integrations/exim/NOTES.md).
• Mode reference implementation (INTENT.md, Mode reference implementation). mas-modes-v0.1-spec/ is a language-neutral contract (handoffs, statuses, timeouts, master/slave roles, outside-master commands) with JSON schemas, including the gateway event, and conformance flows. mas_modes/ holds the email side in both roles (master per resource type over the ticket service, or slave to an outside master that issues case ids), a scripted callback stub, a stub outside master and the flow runner. Email is the only real channel. See docs/reuse-surface.md.
• Live test environment. deploy/railiance/: the MX for mas.coulomb.social, with replies through Scaleway TEM capped at 300. It is temporary; MAS-WP-0007 retires it.

Out of Scope

• Real non-email modes (telephony, chat, SMS, video), connectors to real CMS or ticketing products, and the multimodal framework itself. Other modes exist here only as contract-speaking test stubs.
• Implementations in other languages (TypeScript, Go), until a second consumer exists. That is also the gate for declaring v0.2 final (MAS-WP-0009).
• Postfix policy daemon, Exim profile (until there is demand), mail-client plugins and inspectors, browser extensions, a web composer.
• Central MAS registry, signed statutes, implicit parent-domain inheritance, production identity federation.
• P3 economic semantics: $ and ^ stay reserved. Also payments, signatures and marketplaces.
• Application business logic in the gateway. Production ticketing. Sender policy beyond what the reference service needs to avoid backscatter.
• Irreversible operational actions (cluster teardown, key revocation, redeploys) without founder approval.

Current State

• Status: active. The reference experiment (MAS-WP-0002) passed its decision gate on 2026-10-18; the findings are in docs/experiment-review.md.
• Finished: MAS-WP-0001 to 0006, 0008 and 0010. Postfix profile, v0.1.1 errata, v0.2 draft, address composer, v0.2 conformance cases, and the mode contract with its reference implementation.
• Open: MAS-WP-0007 (retire the live MX; backlog, kept by decision), MAS-WP-0009 (declare v0.2 final; waits for a second implementation), and MAS-WP-0011 to 0013 (proposed).
• v0.2 stays a draft (founder, 2026-10-19).
• P2 is decided: !MODE requests a handoff (founder, 2026-10-19; SCP-8, v0.2 §7.1). The mode contract v0.1 draft and the reference implementation are done (MAS-WP-0010); mas test runs the contract corpus.
• The live MX runs image mas-live:v0.2-a95f848 (redeployed 2026-10-19) and is kept up by founder decision (MAS-WP-0007 stays in backlog). Open follow-ups: MAS-WP-0011 (contract transport security), 0012 (one outbound path and cap), 0013 (harness-independent flows), 0009 (second implementation, now covering both drafts).
• Tests: .venv/bin/pytest runs 242 tests, offline apart from loopback fixtures and the Docker probe. mas test runs four corpora: parser 62, statute 16, v0.2 statute-aware 29, mode contract 172.
• Assessments: history/ (latest: 2026-10-19T090725Z-scope-vs-intent.md).

Getting Oriented

• Start with: INTENT.md, then docs/experiment-review.md and docs/reuse-surface.md
• Agent instructions: AGENTS.md
• Workplans: workplans/