Re: Draft Agenda for Houston

[[e-mail]]

>Part of what needs to be done is to explain carefully to
>non-conformant MTA (and Gateway) operators that they are hurting the
>quality of service for all of the EMail Users in their own enclave,
>and all of the EMail Users who need/want to correspond with the EMail
>Users inside their enclave.
>
>They are not especially affecting the quality of service for people
>outside that set of EMail Users who are involved with the "low
>quality" enclave, but the Low Quality Enclave is in control of and
>damaging its own levels of service.
>
>	Fouling their own nest, so to speak.

While this may be true on the surface it is often not how the operators
of such gateways see things.  From their point of view they are not
really hurting the quality of service for people within their enclave
either.  Commonly, a company's email system is provided for (and used
for) mainly internal traffic.  The gateway is used by relatively few
members of staff.  Even when the volume of traffic across the gateway
grows, as it often does, the growth may be attributed (rightly or
wrongly) to techies getting on Internet mailing lists etc., such
traffic not being part of the mainstream business of the organisation
and therefore (relatively) unimportant.  Getting a company to invest in
someone who understands the issues is hard enough; harder still is
giving them the resources and the responsibility to do something about
it.

Even when you do get a company interested it is difficult to get
anything done about it.  It is unlikely that you will persuade an
organisation to stop using MS-Mail just because its X.400 (or SMTP)
gateway stinks (which it most certainly does).  This comes down to some
law of numbers.  I am wary of making this point as I have not seen any
relevant statistics for a few years but something like 95% of all PC
software goes to LANs/networks of less than 100 systems [corrections on
this point would be most welcome].  This means that the Microsoft's of
this world are not really so interested (at least not so concerned) in
the opinions of the bigger organisations; that is the organisations who
have the expertise and incentive to complain.

It has got to the state that people buy MS-Mail because it is from
Microsoft and they buy cc:Mail because it is the world's
biggest-selling e-mail product.  On the surface the products look good
and, since they come from big corporations and lots of other people buy
them, they must be good.  Very much an IBM type of syndrome.  The fact
that neither product is much good even in a PC-only environment, once
you have more than a few of LANs to interconnect, passes people by
until it is too late.

>And yes, I think we should publish a list of offending gateway
>operators.  You can more or less start with the Commercial Service
>Providers;-).  And of course MS-MAIL.

Go for it!

Alan Young.
-----------
Email:	[e-mail]
X.400:	S=Young;G=Alan;OU=zh014;O=UBS;PRMD=UBS;ADMD=arCom;C=CH
Working at but not representing the Union Bank of Switzerland.