RE: How do I send EDI file securely over Internet via FTP or HTTPS?

A lot of people confuse the theoretical characteristics of SMTP when used entirely in well-configured, well built SMTP servers and the general state of e-mail, with a lot of corporate mail servers coming from products that are not solely SMTP servers and for which administration is a high art sometime practiced in less than perfect human beings.

Real e-mail service has occasional failure to delivery, for which a notification is usually, but not always sent back to the sender, occasional duplication, and very inconsistent transit times. There is no guarantee that batches sent in separate e-mails would arrive in order. And very few servers configured to support real e-mail users can swallow a large batch without choking. 

You could achieve reliable transmission of batches using dedicated, well-built, well-administered SMTP servers, and AS1 but that is beyond the skill and organizational complexities of many users. There are a few vendors that help here, but not enough that you can be assured that a trading partner has a compatible product.

Even if you are lucky and have the skills or common products with your trading partner to do AS1, there is still a problem for large batches. In order to transmit an encrypted or compressed batch using real-email you have to expand it to 133% or more of its original size depending on the scheme you use to represent binary data as a stream of printable characters.

If you are going to set up a special server, as you must for e-mail, why not set up a special HTTP server instead, and use AS2 or ebXML?

Even without AS2 there is certainly a lot of EDI being sent over HTTPS now, using ad hoc specs prepared by channel master trading partners and consortia such as the GISB and AIAG. It seems to take less technical skills to submit batches using HTTPS than using SMTP.


-----Original Message-----
From: Carl Hage [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, May 31, 2002 3:17 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: How do I send EDI file securely over Internet via FTP or
HTTP S?



From:           	"Pae Choi" <[email protected]>
[RE: SMTP/email]
> Of course, that is why it's called "Store-&-Forward" mechanism.
> But it does not guarantee "How soon it will get there!"

Store-and-Forward comes from the old days when people had dialup 
modems. The best guarantee is to deliver directly without forwarding. 
Of course, if you want to send a message but can't reach another 
server you have a problem-- same as if you used http/ftp

I wonder why spammers are the only ones to figure this out. The 
tragedy is that a good way to get rid of junk mail is to delete mail that 
doesn't appear to be store-and-forward.

> Maybe we need new email service that guarantee the delivery
> within a given time, e.g., Fedex or UPS style guarantee delivery. :-)

You can use Fedex to send a package to your neighbor, but it's more 
reliable to walk over and give it to them personally. Same for smtp 
email.

I suppose there could be a business that runs high availabliity, 
geographically isolated redundant servers that can perform an assured 
delivery with store and forward if needed, plus archiving. In theory it 
could be more reliable than your own computer, which could crash and 
corrupt it's files. But a backup-only service is just as good and maybe 
better in some ways.
...
> > Ever received an email 30 days later than sent?

No, but I've received very delayed email, as have friends. At least I've 
received it!

Ever tried accessing a web site and got a connection timed out?

The real issue is how do you deal with the situation when a direct 
delivery can't be made.