[e2e] was Re: A message to authors - nsdi

[Jon Crowcroft]

Michael, and others

we had several problems with NSDI this year
due to silent failure of email. Many of us
have taken for granted that e-mail had become
somewhat of a atomic building block for
delivery of notifications of various things,
but this is (alas) simply incorrect and things
are getting worse - I hate to say this, but we
may find ourselves pushing responsibility
around in future (e.g. authors must poll a
site to check on status, rather than (or as
well as) expecting an event reporting phase
changes such as submission received, 
pdf checked, paper in review, accept/reject 
notification etc 

obviously one can leave in place the e-mail
systems, but it is simply not working - some
of the bayesian rule based filters do not even
give consistent results over the same pair of
sender/recipient, or over a sequence of
messages with the same content...but (and of
course for a spam filter, this is "correct"
since teling a bad guy anything is deemed
self-defeating)
there's no SMTP error notification so end2end
delivery is assumed to have occurred....

users with white listing technologies should
consider adding conference submission sites to
the white list but it aint as simple as that
of course...

j.

p.s. we were even stymied partly by our own
mail system anti-spam measures which include
rate-limiting automatic mail outbound from our
site...

argh!!!