Herman R. Silbiger (hsilbiger@home.com)
Mon, 24 Jan 2000 14:35:46 -0500
We seem to be ascribing different meanings to partial delivery. If we fail to
deliver all the pages in a fax, returning this information to the sender will allow
the sender to retransmit the missing pages. The same is true for a multipart
message when on or more of the parts were not successfully delivered.
It is true that the criteria for declaring a particular page not to be successful
in fax are not defined in the standard and thus each manufacturer has defined their
own. This accounts for the variability noticed by earlier commenters. In any case,
we are dependent on the interpretation of the particular manufacturer for the
decision as to whether it was successful or not.
My personal take on this is that the delivery information to be returned should be
useful and allow appropriate action to be taken. Sometimes we may have to
retransmit the entire message even when we know where the error occurred because it
is not feasible to only retransmit that part of the message.
Graham Klyne wrote:
> At 09:13 AM 1/24/00 -0800, ned.freed@innosoft.com wrote:
> >Now, the enhancement to DSNs presently being discussed is fairly different in
> >character -- we're talking about noting damage to or loss of specific message
> >parts, not loss of bits in an image. But I'm nevertheless worried about the
> >user perception of this facility, especially given past experience in how
> >these
> >things can be misinterpreted.
> >
> >I guess my conclusion is that unless the user agents do a stellar job of
> >correlating the partial delivery information with the original message this
> >feature isn't going to be useful. And given the very slow uptake of user agent
> >support for parsing and correlation of regular DSNs, I'm pretty pessimistic
> >about this entire thing.
>
> I take your point, but it is interesting to note that one of the drivers
> for considering partial delivery notification has come from the traditional
> fax community -- As I recall, ITU-T SG8 have asked for Internet fax to
> report how many pages have been delivered. (I include below what I
> understand to be the requirements from SG8.)
>
> (I'm less clear about the driver from the voice mail community.)
>
> #g
>
> 2.2 Request - 2.2 The fax processed status information in RFC2530
> needs to be enhanced. We need a facility to enable the total number of
> pages and pages in error to be returned to the sender in a MDN to
> indicate successful processing. We need further precision on the fax
> status information using DSN and/or MDN.
>
> 2.3 Request - Similarly the specification within RFC2298 for the
> value processed need to be enhanced. We need further precision to ensure
> that the specific MDN response that is generated clearly indicates that
> the MIME body part(s) has been successfully processed (i.e. printed or
> displayed).
>
> ------------
> Graham Klyne
> (GK@ACM.ORG)
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