Store-and-Forward Full Internet Fax

1
Store-and-Forward Full Internet Fax

• Dave Crocker
• Brandenburg Consulting US 1 [phone]
• www.brandenburg.com MY 60 (19) 3299 445
• dcrocker_at_brandenburg.com Fax [phone]

2
Pro-forma marketing

• Dave Crocker
• Email, EDI, Fax,
• Tech. development
• Startups
• MCI Mail
• Internet standards
• Standards mgmt

• Brandenburg Consulting
• Internet business plans
• Product, system designs
• Technical audits
• Internet standards tracking, contribution

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Present in this talk

• Store-and-forward fax
• Standards effort
• Technical details
• Status

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Nature of fax service

• What you already know...
• Document transmission
• Multi-media objects
• Immediate confirmation
• Broad reach
• Very easy use
• Value-added features
• Multiple recipients
• Sub-addressing

5
Fax over the Internet?

• Cheaper than telephone
• Integrate with other services
• Greater bandwidth (for color)
• All the rest is (potentially interesting)
  commentary...

6
Simple Mode review

• Data
• Tiff
• Packaged in MIME as image/tiff
• Transport
• Classic, conformant Internet Mail
• Telephone number encoding for offramp gateways to
  use

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Building on Simple Mode

• Approach
• Use Simple Mode
• Add confirmation, capabilities exchange,
  session
• Issues
• Confirmation semantics between fax and email
• Email asynchrony makes exchange problematic
• Email session brand new

8
Standards effort

• Efforts
• IETF-Fax working group now seems primary venue...
• ITU schedule is creating the deadlines
• Issues
• Changes to email architecture?
• Schedule

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Confirmation

• Fax
• Delivery confirmation
• What does it really mean?
• Email
• Delivery Service Notice (DSN)
• Message Disposition Notice (MDN)

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Confirmation / take 2

• If fax requires special confirmation mechanism
• Wont interwork with regular email
• Might take longer to standardize
• This is going to require compromise...

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Capabilities exchange

• Email isnt interactive
• Cant get capabilities before sending
• Capabilities might be out of date
• So,
• Define information format
• Define multiple ways to send/get it
• Email/MIME, SMTP, Directory,

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Capabilities / take 2

• Directory service
• Very long on promises
• Very short on service
• No one mechanism likely to satisfy all needs
• So, plan to use multiple
• This is going to take compromise

13
Session mode

• Email isnt real time
• But it can be pretty speedy
• So, set up end-to-end, SMTP-based association for
  sending mail
• Confirmation will be interactive
• Capabilities exchange will be interactive

14
Session mode / take 2

• Significant enhancement to Internet Mail
• Architecture enhancements always challenging
• Infrastructure (internal) changes always take
  long time

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Status

• Seeking
• Full set of draft specificaions for August IETF
• ITU determination in early November
• IETF completion in December
• ITU approval in early 99