--On Monday, March 31, 2014 07:57 -0400 Hector Santos
<hsantos@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>...
> The only time any of this is needed is when there is a tech
> support issue. In my opinion, communications reliability has
> improved over the years where the overhead items are less
> necessary.
Actually, I disagree. While one could develop measures based on
a series of conditions being met, I think that "communications
reliability" can only be measured and reported in some way that
reflects the fraction of messages that leave an origin point
that are fully accounted for (i.e., by being delivered or
non-delivery being adequately reported). Messages that simply
disappear lower that estimate.
Independent of the reasons why quietly discarding messages may
be entirely justifiable, the decisions of the last several year
to do that reduce communications reliability relative to the
time when senders could be assured that messages would either be
delivered or returned (or rejected if the distinction is
relevant). If one comes up with a definition of "legitimate
message" and defines "communications reliability for legitimate
messages" the numbers would obviously be better but, absent very
broad consensus about that definition or 100% accuracy in
decisions about what to discard --two conditions I believe are
very unlikely to be satisfied, but YMMD-- the reliability
estimate is still almost certainly down from the period before
spam and malicious mail became major issues.
>...
> So do we turn it off? Perhaps not, the software would evolved
> where it would be recorded -- somewhere, but maybe not further
> distributed downlink.
For part of the answer, see earlier comments about message
submission.
john