The case of the 500-mile email (2002)
8 days ago
- #tech support
- #networking
- A statistics department chairman reports an issue where emails cannot be sent more than 500 miles.
- The problem started after a consultant patched and rebooted the department's server.
- Testing confirms emails fail beyond a 500-mile radius, but work within it.
- Investigation reveals the server was downgraded to Sendmail 5, which couldn't properly interpret the Sendmail 8 configuration file.
- A zero timeout setting in Sendmail 5 causes connection attempts to fail after approximately 3 milliseconds, correlating to a 500-mile limit based on the speed of light.
- The solution involves understanding the relationship between network latency, the speed of light, and the misconfigured email server settings.