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Re: mobile user strawman argument

  • From: Brad Knowles
  • Date: Sun Jul 03 20:13:13 2005

At 10:01 PM -0400 2005-06-30, Todd Vierling wrote:

 Um, I wasn't talking about an ISP.  I was talking about the MUA with the
 largest market share, and most frequently found security holes, which ships
 with an OS I prefer not to name directly is possible.
There are three key pieces of the puzzle, all of which have to fit together in order to make the whole thing work:

1. The user's ISP

2. The remote ISP

3. The user's equipment (including OS and MUA)

If the user's ISP doesn't provide the necessary services, then nothing else matters. If the user's OS and MUA don't support the necessary services, then nothing else matters. If the remote ISP blocks the necessary services, then nothing else matters.

As a North American Network Operator, the only thing you can control is #1. Whatever problems exist as part of #1, you should have the ability to fix them, but that is the limit of your ability.

 Or is that still too vague?
I'm saying that there are problems in #2 and #3 that also have to be lived with or worked around in some way, otherwise the user is dead in the water.


If that's still too vague, consider that smartphones will soon be the dominant method of connecting to the Internet (if that isn't the case already). I have run into multiple MUAs on a SonyEricsson P900 and a Treo 650 that are sorely broken in a variety of ways, including things like SMTPAUTH, TLSSMTP, POP-before-SMTP, etc....

Oh, and Microsoft still throws some pretty interesting wrenches into the mix.

--
Brad Knowles, <[email protected]>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.