Could you go into a little more detail about setup and the patches?  Are you simply using Paclink to send info to an email address, or has Paclink been patched to be the end email box?

And let me take my concerns a little further.  I live in, and am EC for, a City of 65,000 more or less.  We have trained just under 1,000 CERT volunteers, who are divided up into 9 teams covering areas of roughly equal population.  Each team has a staging area, generally in a park with no physical communications facilities, but with an Incident Command team, including amateur radio for communication between teams and the City EOC.  And I should mention that we are located in the San Francisco Bay Area, as the crow flies about 15 miles from the Hayward fault, 40 miles from the San Andreas fault, and on top of the Calaveras-Concord fault system.  Much of the City (and the Bay Area) is built on what was once river bottom and sea bottom soil.  Beside that, we are located partly on hilly terrain about 12 miles from where the Oakland firestorm occurred.

I operate an AFMARS Paclink station, and regularly use HF Pactor.  Both of these systems have significant latency in establishing telnet communications with the CMS system.  It is difficult for me to see that it is practical for just my 9 CERT teams and the EOC to be accessing a common email address for live reports through Paclink every 30-60 seconds without causing significant congestion to the CMS servers, especially if whatever happens is wide spread, and as many people as I are as enthusiastic about employing Depiction as a linked management tool to avoid trying to do everything by voice messaging.  The same thing is true in spades if the linking process is via APRS, because the APRS radio server in the area which is a high level Wide2-2 hop relay is already constantly busy with relaying traffic from around the Bay Area.

What I think is needed to avoid the congestion problem is Paclink-like software that provides smtp and pop3 services over AX-25 radio and LAN, without using the internet to relay to some other email point.  That way I can set up a server that covers my City alone (or maybe help out the adjacent cities . . . ) on a discrete simplex frequency which does not cause what will inevitably be massive congestion in other services in the event of a widespread emergent event.  That way I don't have to worry about the email address becoming inaccessible because Yahoo's servers are down or AT&T's buildings are damaged and the congestion on the Internet starts to look like an LA freeway at 4:30 PM.

Thanks for listening to my rant.  I really believe that what you have done is the "better mousetrap", and because of that word of it is going to spread like wildfire.  I fear for the possibility of claiming what it can do without foreseeing the unintended consequence of it being so successful that it overwhelms the communications facilities upon which it relies.

Harry Styron, K6HS, AFA9HS (AFF9DM AFMARS Region IX Digital Manager) Walnut Creek, CA EC, Contra Costa County,CA RACES Logistics Chief; 925-932-4300)