Dave, Thanks for the vote of confidence. I have replied to a few people privately (including Messrs. Hodaka, Abley & Richardson , et al), all of whom wrote to suggest scanning the document, then sending it e-mail. One respondent chided me for being for being "US-centric". I work at a Federal Government installation. How am I supposed to think? Mongolian-centric? (don't answer that...) I know that many of you on the list are not in the US. Claudio is not even in the Western Hemisphere. That does not mean that I am ignoring their needs, just as I don't want them to ignore my needs. Even so, I would like to thank all of them for their suggestions, but I will also list below the reasons (for everyone else) why we don't do much scanning. First, I must admit that I think a small percentage of people around NASA (including their contractors) have the attitude of "we have always done it this way", thus they are not interested in change. I am not one of them. If I was, I would not be on this list. Second, we do not have a lot of scanners in our network (not much requirement for them), so we must either buy one (not easy to do with our current budget), or find someone to do it for us. These people are few & far between, and usually too busy to assist us, or they are doing so much scanning of their own that they tie up their equipment. And for security reasons, NASA (at least in Houston) does not like for us to use each other's computers without the "owner" being present. Either way, this ties up 2 people for one scanning job. And that slows things down quite a bit versus faxing a document to the end user. Third, and possibly the most significant reason is that we send things that are one-time-only requirements. If we know in advance that we need to send this to a lot of others, we could scan it & create a PDF, instead of POLL faxing. Polling would take longer, depending on the number of recipients. The delay to the users on the bottom of a long POLL list could be excessive, thus scanning might be a good alternative. However, this is a very rare case around here (in my experience). Fourth is storage space. If we scanned every document we thought we might need, it would require a StorageTek data warehouse like the one used in the Harrison Ford movie "Clear & Present Danger". Most of the documents we would be scanning will never need to be sent to anyone via e-mail. All of that scanning would be a waste of labor in a tight-budget environment. Fifth. Most of the people to whom the document is sent require a hard-copy for a data package or some other file, so they would print the electronic document on the other end, anyway. Fax is a lot faster than scanning on this end of an e-mail & printing on the other end. I must admit that the resolution from the sender's 600 dpi scanner & the recipient's 1200 dpi laser printer is probably better than the average fax, but we must always be aware of the extra time requirements for e-mail transmission versus fax. Sometimes, the document is needed so quickly on the other end that scanning here & printing there could cost us a launch deadline (an extreme example, to be sure, but a possibility, nonetheless). So, I will repeat a previous posting: NASA needs FAX. Think of the money to be saved, everywhere in the world, when governments & businesses (and individuals) can send fax via the Net & not pay long-distance rates. Thanks again & regards to all, Richard Coles -----Original Message----- From: Dave Crocker [mailto:dcrocker@brandenburg.com] Sent: Sunday, July 07, 2002 1:18 PM To: COLES, RICHARD J. (JSC-EV) (LM) Cc: ietf-fax@imc.org; ietf@ietf.org Subject: RE: Last Call: SMTP Service Extension for Content Negotiation toP roposed Standard At 11:39 AM 7/3/2002 -0500, COLES, RICHARD J. (JSC-EV) (LM) wrote: >I just wanted to be sure that everyone knew how important >FAX is to NASA (and, I suppose, to other agencies of the >Federal government). Right. Folks often do not realize that even Telex is still a critical infrastructure service, for portions of the world. My guess is that we are looking at 10-20 years before fax is truly relegated to a minor role. Fully replacing well-established infrastructures takes a very long time, no matter how quickly a new one emerges. One reason for doing fax over the Internet is for cheaper and faster fax service, but another is to integrate the fax and email communities, as much as is reasonable. (Personally I have a third goal, which is to provide email with a target service level that is more demanding that Internet mail has provided until now and is known to be useful for business; with fax we get that, and we do not need to debate the philosophy of business communications.) d/ ---------- Dave Crocker <mailto:dcrocker@brandenburg.com> Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://www.brandenburg.com> tel +1.408.246.8253; fax +1.408.850.1850