Re: [HC Evolution] SMS

[Jamie Zawinski <jwz jwz org>]

It seems to me that all this email-to-pager stuff should be hidden 
behind email-to-pager gateways.  Building knowledge of these various 
and sundry protocols directly in to end-user mail clients seems 
completely backwards.

What cellular/pager services do *not* offer an email interface?  
I thought just about all the cellular providers accepted email now. 
Because they finally wised up and realized that it was easier for 
them to write a gateway once, than to re-train every single person 
who wanted to correspond with one of their customers (or worse, get 
code added to every single mail client.)

> Another thing that might be worth thinking about regarding this, is
> that SMS messages can only be 160 characters long... So when you
> compose a SMS-message, there should be some limit to how long the
> message can be.

This would also be Wrong, because 1: you can't know what the actual
limit is, or will be in the future, and 2: people might be doing 
clever things (for example, Nat had a filter that stripped all of 
the vowels out of mail before it reached his phone, so the real 
limit was 160 consonants and spaces.)

It used to be that the gateways that the phone/pager providers used
didn't know about MIME; I remember many occasions when someone would
take out their pager and read aloud, "this is a cryptographically 
signed message in mime format.  Content type text plain charset iso
eight eight five nine one.  Content transfer encoding quoted printable.
Content...  Oops, that's all it says."

The phone folks fixed this by making their gateways know about MIME.
It wasn't necessary to make the mail client smart enough to know not
to MIME-encapsulate things being sent to pagers (though that was
suggested.)  

Sometimes if you ignore a problem long enough, it just goes away on
its own.

-- 
Jamie Zawinski
jwz jwz org             http://www.jwz.org/
jwz dnalounge com       http://www.dnalounge.com/