RE: reliable messaging - hop by hop

[David Fischer <david@drummondgroup.com>]

Yes, exactly.  NRR proves receipt *and* proves that the message did not
change -- even better than registered mail.

Regards,

David Fischer
Drummond Group.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Weinreb [mailto:dlw@exceloncorp.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2001 11:53 PM
To: david@drummondgroup.com
Cc: chris.ferris@east.sun.com; ebxml-msg@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: reliable messaging - hop by hop


I see.  So from the point of view of what I was talking about, the
really key point in what you're saying is that there's a significant
legal reason to resolve the question of whether the message was
"delivered" in the sense of the receiver taking some kind of
responsibility for the message.

Earlier I said:

   If that's all that the NRR means, it seems to me that it's not
   terribly useful.  Suppose party F sends a message to party T, and gets
   back such an NRR.  Later there is a dispute, and F wants to "prove"
   (introduce evidence that) T really did "receive" the message, and so
   it introduces the signed NRR as evidence.  T replies that, well, yes,
   the message did get into its MSH, but T never actually processed the
   incoming message; it was just sitting there on the disk somewhere and
   nobody ever actually looked at it.  In this way T can effectively
   repudiate the message in spite of the existence of a signed NRR.
   So the signed NRR really doesn't help F; he might as well not have
   it at all.

The answer is that once T signed a receipt, T has taken responsibility
for receiving the message, and the fact that he has received it is *in
itself* an important fact, one worth being able to prove, even if it
doesn't prove anything further about how the message might be
interpreted by any application.  OK, that makes sense.  Thank you.