Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?
10 months ago
- #humor
- #networking
- The article explores whether an email can travel more than 500 miles in 2025, referencing a humorous anecdote about a university president and a sysadmin.
- A code snippet is provided to test nonblocking connect with a short timeout (3ms), adjusted to simulate the 500-mile limit based on lightspeed delays.
- Experiments with connecting to various universities show that many are hosted in the same data centers, making the 500-mile limit irrelevant for most cases.
- Ping tests reveal that some universities, like Rutgers and CMU, are within the 500-mile range, while others, like UDayton, exceed it and fail to connect.
- MX server tests indicate that many universities outsource email hosting, making it difficult to determine physical distance-based connectivity.
- The conclusion states that the 500-mile limit still exists for misconfigured servers, but real-world email routing makes it hard to enforce based on geographic distance.