Dnia 18.05.2020 o godz. 22:38:11 yuv pisze: > The problem of Internet email is the problem of any federated standard. > Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Internet email is being replaced by text > messaging, and I dare betting that fax will survive Internet email, > because fax has a niche that Internet email has failed to create for > itself. > > Fax niche is the communication with adverse interest. A minimum common > denominator, that enable the less powerful of the parties to stay in the > game. Internet email could have been even better. Could have... > > I am not expecting process serving standards (though I wish mechanical > process serving could be replaced by something electronic). Just the same > reliability of fax transmission (if the message gets lost after the 250, > the fax operator is liable) would be good enough to give Internet email > more purpose than the delivery of spam.
As a non-lawyer, it is hard for me to understand what you're trying to debate about. Even physical postal mail service does not give any guarantee that the recipient has actually READ your mail. (BTW, it's even a recurring theme in movies and books that person A keeps sending letters to person B, but they never get to the recipient as some other person C, who is a family member of person B, intercepts and hides them). Even if you send via registered mail and request delivery confirmation, nobody will guarantee you that the recipient hasn't thrown your letter into the trash right away after picking it up from the post office. If you have your OWN SERVER, a 250 reply to SMTP transaction is an equivalent of confirming that the message has arrived into your "mailbox". But by the "mailbox", we should consider the entire mail system here, as it's your own mail system and it's you who decides how it works. If YOU decided, that messages matching particular criteria are silently discarded (which is technically the same as deleting them right away after they are delivered), it's equal to the case I described above - where YOU throw the physical letter into the trash right away after having it delivered to you. In both cases it's the recipient who decided to discard the message without looking at it. What's ethically doubtful in this? If it were a third party who discarded the message - yes, that would be unethical (and probably against the law as well). But if the recipient does it him/herself - I can see no ethical or legal issue at all. What more do you want to expect from SMTP? Do you want to expect it to provide something that even physical mail - and similarly your glorified fax - doesn't provide? Ie. a guarantee that recipient has actually READ your mail? No asynchronous communication method will guarantee you that, simply because of the very fact it's asynchronous, ie. the delivery of the message is separated in time from the act of actually reading it by the recipient, and the latter may never happen (imagine sending e-mail to a still functioning e-mail address of a person who has just died; the same is true for postal mail and fax as well. Is a 250 reply in that case also a "lie" or "misrepresentation"?). If you want to have guarantee that your message actually got to the recipient, you must use synchronous communication - face-to-face meeting, telephone, videoconference etc. so that you can see/hear the actual response of your correspondent in real time. -- Regards, Jaroslaw Rafa r...@rafa.eu.org -- "In a million years, when kids go to school, they're gonna know: once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub."
