[Ecrit] Does it make sense to email to urn:service:sos?

["Rosen, Brian" <Brian.Rosen at neustar.biz>]

The subject of emailing an emergency request comes up from time to time.
So far, we've dismissed the idea primarily because email is not a real
time protocol.

In the U.S., we have started working towards supporting SMS for
emergency use.  The objection raised is "SMS is not a real time
protocol".

My response to the SMS issue is "although it's certainly true that it
isn't a real time protocol, and messages can be delayed by minutes,
hours, or even days, people use it as if it was real time, and deal with
the reality that it isn't.  Many users have an expectation that they
should be able to text to the emergency service".

Is that not true, perhaps to somewhat less degree, for email?  Users are
indeed less likely to treat email as real time, but in fact they often
use it as if it was.

Let us consider what it would take to allow email for emergency
services:
1. We would need a way to convey location in SMTP
2. We would need a way to mark an emergency email
3. We would need a way to route an emergency email
It goes without saying that a PSAP could send a reply email to the
originator.

2 and 3 could clearly be virtually identical to what we use for calls:
"dial string" translation to urn:service:sos, LoST routing to a URI,
regular email routing to that URI.  1 would require a new feature in
SMTP.  I'm not sure there is any analog to the "recognize the local dial
string, translate to the service urn, retarget to the PSAP URI", but it
does seem like a straightforward thing for an email server to do.

Does this make any sense?  Is there a good reason NOT to do it?

Brian


_______________________________________________
Ecrit mailing list
Ecrit at ietf.org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ecrit