North American Network Operators Group

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Re: what the heck do i do now?

  • From: Rich Kulawiec
  • Date: Thu Feb 01 07:43:15 2007

On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 07:04:37PM -0800, Matthew Kaufman wrote:
> (As an example, consider what happens *to you* 
> if a hospital stops getting emailed results back from their outside 
> laboratory service because their "email firewall" is checking your 
> server, and someone dies as a result of the delay)

A hospital which relies on email for laboratory results is obviously
negligent.  They should know that email is "best-effort", no better, and
that as a result it's an unreliable transport medium.  (And increasingly
so given the massive abuse being heaped on it as well as any number of
ill-conceived "anti-abuse" ideas (C/R, callbacks) that actually make
the problem worse.)  Using it for life-critical data is foolish.

There are much better choices available (including offline ones such as
FedEx) for the transfer for critical information.

---Rsk