This is really about a sensible as burning your post in the morning unless you recognise the handwriting on the envelope and is quite on a par with the requirement for a man with a red flag walking in front of a car.

Email is becoming ever more common in the population at large and it is quite impractical to determine in advance who might have a legitimate need to send you an email. Health Authorities are public bodies and I would not accept an Health Authorities refusing to accept email from me than I would of them refusing to accept a letter, fax or phone call. It hardly makes for open government and certainly doesn't fit with the current governments plans to modernise the NHS so I would expect strong support from ministers to deal with email ludites in the NHS.

Junk mail, fax and phone calls are a pain but we have found ways of coping with them and occasional we learn something of value or interest from unsolicited communication. Spam email is also a pain but again there are ways of coping. The low cost of bulk email creates new opportunities for abuse but the technology also provides new tools to counter such abuse. Excluding the well known spammers from your email system and others who regular abuse access will keep the problem down to manageable proportions.

Don't throw the baby out with the bath water and don't imagine that the problem of unsolicited communication is a new one unique to email.

Like those who wanted the man with a red flag in front of a car those who want to restrict email are simply frightened and are trying to kill not control the object of the fear. The world may have been a better place in the anti-car lobby had succeeded. I think email is much more benign .

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ewan Davis
AAH Meditel - Voice +44 (1) 527 579414 Fax +44(1)527 837287
Email [log in to unmask] also at [log in to unmask]


-----Original Message-----
From:	Adrian Midgley [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:	Monday, June 29, 1998 11:09 PM
To:	[log in to unmask]
Subject:	Re: Somerset boost monopoly

[log in to unmask],Net writes:
>Interesting isn't it? Cornwall and Scilly need prior approval to allow
>email in - and Somerset won't answer!

It is even cleverer than that!

AFAIK the threat by Somerset was not that they would not answer - in
that NHS Net we are told receives messages from the outside world
adequately well..... through the gateway.

But rather that they would not _send_ any messages to the pariahs who
used the same system as the rest of the world.
I rather think it comes from the same disinformation source as the
story about X400 being the lingua franca for Internet mail handling
among the Unix backbones and what-have-you....

However, the Cornwall and Scilly approach is one that I have some sligh
sympathy with, as long as they combine it with an effective
intelligence and dissemination operation so that once they get an
e-mail address for somebody who _might_ have a need to send them
something, they program it into their gatekeeper.

The beauty of this approach is that they thus create a virtual private
e-mail system, and thus remove one more of the major arguments for
having a special network for the NHS - if one can control message
reception to members of the workgroup, then the size of the internet
becomes irrelevant (it always was of course, but could be made to
appear a factor).

I have a feeling that it is frowned upon to corrupt the RFC 822 rules
by pretending that somebody does not exist and generating RFC 822
messages off the servers back to the originator, but it is quite fair
game to send back an auto reply along the lines of "You are not on
[log in to unmask] 's approved list and your message is returned, ring
1234 567 890 to request a form on which to apply for permission to
message the selfsame panjandrum".

Of course, if C&S HA did that to one of their MPs they might then have
cause to reconsider their approach.  Just a thought<g>