Keith Moore (moore@cs.utk.edu)
Tue, 25 Jan 2000 00:56:27 -0500
> With all respect to you and Keith, this recent thread and
> both of your remarks below come perilously close to saying
> that Quality of Service is entirely subjective and therefore
> interoperability testing is a waste of time for Internet
> Fax services.
well, I don't believe that. so there must be a gap somewhere.
first of all, interop testing potetntially has more means at
its disposal to verify correct operation than an MTA or
gateway has. at an interop test you can send a fax end-to-end
and compare the results with the original. An MTA or gateway
that is trying to send back a non-delivery report cannot, in
general, determine how much signal degradation has occurred.
Also, for the specific case of email-to-fax gateways I think you
could (with some work) probably define reasonably good criteria for
an overeall 'delivered with some degradation' vs. 'not delivered'
decision, where the criteria for 'delivered' is substantially better
than 'anything goes' and not quite as stringent as 'every pixel on
every page transmitted without error'. And you could probably define
similar criteria for other specific cases.
What I don't think you can do - or at least, I don't see how to do -
is define reasonable 'delivered' vs. 'not delivered' criteria for
arbitrary multipart MIME messages.
Keith
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Tue Jan 25 2000 - 08:00:23 IST