Re: [Paddlewise] SPOT - A few observations

On Wed, Oct 01, 2008 at 11:50:02AM -0700, Derek wrote:
> It should be pointed out that the SPOT system does allow you to
> send your distress signal to multiple email addresses.  This does
> not eliminate possible delay, but it does statistically improve your
> chances of the message being delivered in a timely fashion.  

Probably, but not definitely.  Part of this depends on whether or not
the email origination point is scrupulously compliant with both de jure
and de facto standards for email.  For example, is it located on
a known-clean network block?  Does it have correct forward and reverse
DNS?  Does it obey the SMTP protocol wrt no pre-greeting traffic?
Is the envelope-sender syntactically correct?  Does it issue messages
with proper Message-ID fields?  And so on.

The more of these things they get right, the better the odds.  But a
surprising number of "people who should know better" get it wrong --
e.g., Google, Schwab and Apple.    And even then: there's nothing they
can do about similar sets of problems on the receiving side.  Hotmail
is well-known for throwing incoming messages on the floor, Yahoo's
greylisting is frequently broken, some people still foolishly use mail
quotas, others run broken accept-then-bounce crap like Exchange, etc.

So unless they have at least one very senior and very experienced person
taking care of their outbound email server(s), I wouldn't want to rely
on it for *any* delivery, let alone time-critical delivery.  Heck, I'm
one of the most experienced people out there w.r.t. email operations,
and there are occasionally problems that send me back for a third or
fourth cup of coffee.  It's gotten MUCH harder in the last decade,
as the level of postmaster competence worldwide continues to fall and
the level and sophistication of attacks continues to rise.

And all this is before we get into questions about their underlying
connectivity to the Internet: do they have multiple, independent
connections?  (If only one, then one happens when the same weather
event that puts a paddler in distress takes out their single connection?)

I don't know the answers to many, even most, of these questions, so I
don't want to give the impression that I do.  I merely mean to raise
them, not to attempt to answer them.

---Rsk
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