Re: Draft Agenda for Houston

[Einar Stefferud <[e-mail]>]

There is a very common fallacy that since most traffic (80-90%) is
local/internal, that the quality of external service is unimportant.

But, this ratio almost always holds, so we have to ask how important
external traffic is, regardless of its percentage of the total.

Just ask one simply question:

Since only 10-20% of a company's phone calls are external, why not
save a lot of money by disconnecting the external trunk lines?

The answer is of course obvious!  When the external trunks are cut,
the reason for the company being in business is threatened.

So this point needs to be made in the argument for improvement of the
quality of external EMail service.

But, this is really just beating around the edges of my logic here.

My point is not that some people just are not logical, or that they
may even be stupid, which is often enough true.  I want to make a more
important point, which so many people miss when considering how things
work in the Internet.

In the Internet, each end brings a certain quality to any connecton
across the net.  The quality of that connection depends on the quality
provided by both ends.  The quality of the connection is not
controlled by some carrier service provider in between.  Especially in
terms of the EMail gateway behavior on either end.

The quality of service is determined by the two ends, not the middle,
as many people think.  They are just thinking in terms of PTT Style
Message Services, and are simply not aware of their own end
responsibilities.

I often find (from running many mailing lists) that there are sites
where the users are convinced that the entire Internet is a rotten low
quality service, when in fact, it was all due to their own local EMail
gateway service.  They could only see the Internet through their own
rotten service on their end.  Tehy cannot usefully excahnage EMail
with anyone.

This is the major point to get across, that any end can only expect to
get as good as they give.

It is like the problems of quality control on your plain paper copier.
If you accept poor quality, and do not call for service, you will come
to believe that all copiers must be bad, and that you cannot expect
anything better.

Well, it only depends on whether or not you call for service when the
quality is below your stadnards, so the quality of your service shows
more about where you have set your standards, than anything else.  

Speaking figuratively, if you are not smart enough to call for better
service, then you deserve what you get.

Cheers...\Stef