/me fights and defeats the awesome forces of inertia and laziness to actually do a tiny bit of research
On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 06:49 -0700, Josh Coates wrote: > > As we're constantly reminding our users, E-mail is, and never was > > designed to be, an instant form of communication. > > who says? The opening sentence of RFC 821 states " The objective of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is to transfer mail reliably and efficiently." http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc821.html That said, I do have anecdotal evidence for the other side too. When I first started using this new Internet-thingy, I remember repeatedly reading that the speed and reliability of SMTP was a minor miracle and that no one expected it last. The fact that is has is a testament to its simple robustness, but let's not let a couple decade's familiarity make us complacent. At any rate, it doesn't matter what the original designers intended. The fact is that e-mail isn't as immediate as other forms of communication. If you call or IM me, you'll find out pretty quick whether I got the message. If you send me an email, however, you don't know if I'm at my desk, at the movie theater, on an intercontinental flight, or hacking my way through deep Amazonian jungle. A backhoe could have taken out my network connection, the server room could have been hit by a meteor and SMTP won't tell you for hours. Personally, I love greylisting. If you're uncomfortable with it, by all means don't use it. The more people that use it, the less effective it will be. Right now, it works miracles for me. I use nothing else and get almost zero spam. If I could, I'd keep greylisting my little secret forever. And now for a "back in my day moment". Although I started using that Internet-thingy before college, I had my first high-speed connection freshman year. One day I sent a friend in the neighboring building a message asking something random. Four months later (now very much out of context) he received the (now rather confusing) message. He swore he'd never seen the message before, the message appeared to have just gotten wedged then unwedged much later. Sure, SMTP is great, but I'm convince there're still a few demons hiding in the machines. -- Stuart Jansen e-mail/jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED] google talk: [EMAIL PROTECTED] :0 # copy & paste for your convenience * ^From:.*sjansen@ /dev/null # /ignore [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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