Keith Moore (moore@cs.utk.edu)
Mon, 24 Jan 2000 19:48:35 -0500
> Either a system "takes responsibility" for delivery and notification, or it
> does not.
no question there, but I fail to see how it applies to the current situation.
> You may treat personal email in a cavalier manner, but don't force its
> failings onto FAX carriage.
there's nothing cavalier about it. my point was that in a world where
different recipients have drastically different capabilities, it's
fairly hard to define "successful delivery" in a way that actually
makes sense. the "obvious" definition - require that every part
be delivered or else it's a failure - turns out to produce
counterintuitive behavior in a significant number of cases.
which doesn't mean that the obvious answer is the wrong one,
but it probably does mean that it needs a closer look.
and I don't believe for a millisecond that email-to-foo gateway
vendors/operators are going to be willing to return "failure"
DSNs every time they can't translate every single portion of the
message content.
Keith
p.s. I don't see why we should force FAX's limitations onto email, either.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Tue Jan 25 2000 - 02:52:14 IST