On Tue, 1 Jul 2014, Steve Bergman wrote:
I'm not at all sure what you're talking about regarding email vs web form
reliability. What are the links in that chain?
The email client can malfunction in some way. But then again, so can a
browser. The sending server can malfunction in some way. But so can the web
proxy. Then WAN link can go down on the sending side. But then, that can
happen with both web and email. The receiving side's WAN can go down too. But
in the case of a mail server it tries and tries and tries to get the message
through as quickly as possible. The browser and proxy server certainly don't.
They just drop it if anything goes wrong.
But the user *sees* that failure *immediately* and can fall back to an
alternate method of communication, say, a telephone call, if the situation
is as urgent as you portray.
Email is store-and-forward best-effort with *no guarantees* of timely
delivery, no matter how well it performs 99% of the time. An email message
can get stuck for a day or more at any (or even all) of the intermediate
hops, and the system is *working properly* if it is ultimately delivered,
or a notification is eventually sent back to the user that it cannot be
delivered.
And greylisting is a perfectly valid way to behave within the defined
communications protocol. It fails because poor admins set the delivery
retry time to an absurdly-long period, or poor programmers write MTAs that
don't even know *how* to retry.
FWIW, I did not say, and did not have in mind a web-email form when I made
my suggestion. I had in mind a more-direct interface to the trouble ticket
management system. Of course, I may be assuming a more-sophisticated
operation than is the case.
--
John Hardin KA7OHZ http://www.impsec.org/~jhardin/
jhar...@impsec.org FALaholic #11174 pgpk -a jhar...@impsec.org
key: 0xB8732E79 -- 2D8C 34F4 6411 F507 136C AF76 D822 E6E6 B873 2E79
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