Need email server aid

[Chan Chung Hang Christopher]

Alvin Thompson wrote:
> On 04/24/2010 02:56 AM, Chan Chung Hang Christopher wrote:
>> How do you verify the email source before you implement the command(s)?
> 
> If you have the device's public key, you can accept only messages 
> encoded with the devices private key.  I believe this is done at the 
> transport level (the TLS handshake), so you don't have to worry about it 
> in your code or write any code differently--it just works.  See articles 
> on how PKI (public key infrastructure) works.  It's quite interesting.

I doubt that using smtp, however secured, for auto configuration or 
whatever automatic stuff is a good idea.


> 
>> An embedded web server for remote control is something that would be
>> expected nowadays if you ask me. And maybe your own protocol and a
>> client gui on Windows/Linux/Mac OS X/OpenSolaris.
> 
> That's fine if there is aways going to be a human to send the all 
> messages and verify every message is sent.  Otherwise, you'll need 
> software to send the messages reliably.  See my message above pointing 
> out that SMTP achieves that reliability without too much additional 
> complexity.  But I agree that you can (and probably should) add a 
> lightweight web server for showing status and for remote commands that 
> are necessarily human-controlled.

/me stares at list of various protocols, proprietary and open, used for 
router/switch/access-point configuration/communication.

Hmm, none of them chose to use an existing protocol like smtp with its 
email parsing overhead.


> 
> As a Java developer, I'll point out that a web server with JMS can also 
> approximate the reliability of SMTP, but it's much more complex to 
> implement and adding a Java and J2EE stack may be use up more resources 
> on an embedded device than he wants or has.
> 

Reliability of smtp? I suppose if delays of five days or a day are 
tolerated or not at all....