[94675] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: what the heck do i do now?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rich Kulawiec)
Thu Feb 1 07:34:53 2007
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2007 07:25:23 -0500
From: Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <45C158C5.2020003@eeph.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
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
