It used to work that way, but in this day of spam, the idea of mail taking more than one route is just about dead. Only in the largest organizations, where one mail server acts as the overall gateway, does mail pass through more than one server. Even then, there is rarely more than one route. (I'm referring to the mail as a message, not the individual packets, which may take more than one route.)
The reason is that nobody except spammer-friendly organizations deliberately runs an "open relay" any more. Back in the pre-spam days, there were lots of mail servers that would accept mail from and for any domain, creating a big collaborative system. Today, nobody (on purpose) accepts mail destined for a domain other than those they control unless it is from someone within their own organization. The big security hole in the original mail transfer system is that the standard did not include a way to authenticate the mail sender. In other words, there is no standard for requiring a password before sending mail. You'd think that would be easy to fix, but it's not, although some interesting work-arounds have been created, such as SMTP-after-POP. This may shed light on my earlier joke about configuring sendmail... Nick > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On > Behalf Of J. van Baardwijk > Sent: Saturday, February 23, 2002 12:33 AM > To: Brin-L > Subject: Re: Whacked-out mail timing (was Re: SCOUTED: US and Europe) > > > At 20:19 22-2-02 -0600, Adam Lipscomb wrote: > > >Now, if someone will explain what "propagation delay" is, other than > >sensible use of birth control. > > In a sense, it is the same. The major difference is that it is not genes > but e-mail messages that get delayed. :-) > > But seriously. > > Messages get send from one server to another (a process known as > "hopping"), and eventually end up on your ISP's mail server. > Sometimes this > forwarding gets delayed (could be for various reasons). The > result is that > messages sometimes are sent on ("hop") to the next server in a different > order than they arrived, which results in you seeing replies to e-mails > before seeing the initial message. This can also be caused by messages > taking different routes to get from A to B. > > All this from memory, BTW, so anyone feel free to correct me. > > > Jeroen > > _________________________________________________________________________ > Wonderful World of Brin-L Website: http://www.Brin-L.com > Tom's Photo Gallery: http://tom.vanbaardwijk.com
