From: mc!Brad_Hicks/OU=0205925@mhs.attmail.com
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Future of fax
Date: 9 Apr 92 14:48:27 GMT
Article-I.D.: eecs.telecom12.308.4
Organization: TELECOM Digest
X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 12, Issue 308, Message 4 of 11

shaw@pegasus.com (Sandy Shaw) writes:
 
> He says that all his clients that send either long faxes frequently or
> many faxes, especially to international locations, end up switching to
> other forms of communication, network, e-mail, etc.
 
To a later note, TELECOM Moderator noted:
 
> One large air freight company has five or six fax machines
> in a rotary hunt group for their *incoming* stuff.

At MasterCard, we're a HUGE fax user; our lost and stolen card
reporting center upstairs works just like the mailroom that Pat
described, though I'd have to go upstairs and count to find out just
how many numbers there are in that hunt group (not my department, so I
don't have it memorized).

We also use fax heavily in negotiating settlements between
cardholders, merchants, and their respective banks, and in settling
MasterCard rules disputes.
 
Fax will probably NEVER go away here for handling replacement of lost
and stolen cards.  We need a communications medium that can handle
inbound and outbound signed forms from anywhere in the world on an
impromptu, one-time basis and to hundreds or thousands of banks in a
matter of minutes.  (Actually, a lot of our outbound fax has been
automated lately; the database that issues temporary replacement card
numbers faxes the the issuer reports to the banks via an email
service.)
 
We just put in SoftSwitch Central and SoftSwitch X.400 so all our
company email systems can communicate to any X.400 mailbox (and almost
any Internet mailbox) in the world; in fact, that's how I'm getting
this message out.  But the technical obstacles are immense,
particularly in the X.400 world that almost all non-US businesses
depend on.
 
How bad? Imagine if every time you dropped a letter in the mail: 

(1) You had to know the exact spelling of every word of the address.

(2) Punctuation rules were idiosyncratic but no errors were tolerated.

(3) Each state or city formatted addresses differently, and if your
return address wasn't formatted EXACTLY right for your city's
conventions, and the recipient address wasn't formatted just as
precisely for their city's post office, the letter wouldn't be
delivered. 

(4) Inclusion of extraneous or unnecessary detail in the address would
derail the message.  And,

(5) if you make any of the above errors, the message is not delivered
 ... but you AREN'T TOLD that it wasn't delivered.
 
Right now, X.400 email interconnections too closely resemble two
over-polite gentlemen standing side by side at a doorway.  "You go
first."  "No, I insist, after you."  The only really practical way to
guarantee that you get somebody's address right is to look at a
message that they send to you ... but how do they get YOUR address
right to do so?  You'd have to send them a message first, and hence
infinite regress.

What actually happens is that both sides try variations on the X.400
O/R address until a message gets through, usually in one to three
tries per side.
 
The guys at Bell Labs were smarter than we sometimes give them credit
for.  Phone numbers are elegantly designed for providing an
unambiguous, easy to read, consistently formatted network address.
Eric Arnum, of the newsletter {Electronic Mail and Micro Systems}, has
been campaigning for about a year now for the standards bodies to
throw out both the RFC 822 and the X.400 specs and give each email
vendor a three-digit "area code" and a seven or so digit "name space"
and let them assign it as they will.

Funny thing is, fax already comes with that "interface."
 
(Then you get into complexities over how to deliver anything other
than English-language text in plain ASCII, but I'm depressed enough as
it is.  I'll leave that for a future message.)
 

J. Brad Hicks
Internet: mhs!mc!Brad_Hicks@attmail.com
X.400:    c=US admd=ATTmail prmd=MasterCard sn=Hicks gn=Brad
 
I am not an official MasterCard spokesperson, and the message above
does not contain official MasterCard statements or policies.