On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 07:04:37PM -0800, Matthew Kaufman wrote:
(As an example, consider what happens *to you* if a hospital stops getting emailed results back from their outside laboratory service because their "email firewall" is checking your server, and someone dies as a result of the delay)
A hospital which relies on email for laboratory results is obviously negligent. They should know that email is "best-effort", no better, and that as a result it's an unreliable transport medium. (And increasingly so given the massive abuse being heaped on it as well as any number of ill-conceived "anti-abuse" ideas (C/R, callbacks) that actually make the problem worse.) Using it for life-critical data is foolish. There are much better choices available (including offline ones such as FedEx) for the transfer for critical information. ---Rsk