--As of July 1, 2014 7:39:43 PM -0500, Steve Bergman is alleged to have
said:
On 07/01/2014 05:07 PM, motty cruz wrote:
If it needs to be *instant*, have them visit a web page to enter service
requests.
Because there's not way that web-based email forms can be abused.
Please. The whole delay thing is about the ridiculous greylisting kluge.
There are plenty of other spam avoidance kluges which don't involve
significant delay. I really can't believe what I'm hearing here. It has
little to nothing to do with reality. Spam is a problem. But you don't
have to make your users wait hours for important emails by making your
mail servers play "hard to get" games with each other.
This is just silly.
If I forwarded this conversation to my email users, they'd be ROTFL over
what the "experts" are saying about the tool they use daily.
It has problems. But long delays would be unacceptable. And http can't
really replace all it's functionality. Web email forms are the slow,
limiting, and annoying.
--As for the rest, it is mine.
95+% of the time, email is immediate, true. But it is not uncommon for
mail to be delayed for hours or days either, even without greylisting. It
happens in the wild all the time, even (especially...) with the big
providers. Email is also not 100% reliable: It is a best-effort service
and can and does drop messages on occasion. (With varying degrees of
notification: By the spec, notification should always happen, but
experience says that causes backscatter, so it's not always by the spec.)
If you need an immediate, reliable communication method email will appear
to work - but will randomly fail, and there will be *nothing you can do
about it.* If that's what your users are expecting you are doing a
*disservice* to your users, because it *won't work.*
There are solutions that will, which have higher overhead costs than email.
A password-protected web form is better - it won't fail silently. Or there
are specialist messaging protocols. But if your users are expecting email
to be that solution you are going to give yourself headaches.
Now, if 'most of the time' immediate communication is enough, that's fine.
It may not be worth it for you to implement a higher reliability protocol -
they cost time and money. (I used to work for a company who's sole product
was a 100% reliable communication protocol.) But don't complain when it
fails, because it will, and both you and the users need to expect that.
Daniel T. Staal
---------------------------------------------------------------
This email copyright the author. Unless otherwise noted, you
are expressly allowed to retransmit, quote, or otherwise use
the contents for non-commercial purposes. This copyright will
expire 5 years after the author's death, or in 30 years,
whichever is longer, unless such a period is in excess of
local copyright law.
---------------------------------------------------------------
