Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!ukma!xanth!ginosko!uunet!crdgw1!sungod!davidsen
From: davidsen@sungod.crd.ge.com (ody)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Sending email from CompuServe to the Internet
Message-ID: <1654@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
Date: 14 Aug 89 15:47:55 GMT
References: <8908130008KP@WSMR-SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL> <89Aug13.034413edt.18549@me.utoronto.ca>
Sender: news@crdgw1.crd.ge.com
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric Corp. R&D, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 33

In article <89Aug13.034413edt.18549@me.utoronto.ca> yap@me.utoronto.ca (Davin Yap) writes:

| 	Nope.  This just ain't true.  Mail between Internet sites takes
| 	place practically immediately.  Most mail gets delivered in a
| 	matter of minutes, regardless of how far apart the sites are
| 	physically.  If you're really impatient you can talk directly to
| 	the sendmail daemon on the receiving machine (if you know how
| 	;-).  

  Well... that's almost true. TCP mail requires that the sender,
receiver, and all gateways be up at once. In practice a certain amount
of internet mail gets delayed at least hours. We're in NYSERnet with
uunet and see arival times for messages from other nets (NSFnet, MILNET)
take over an hour at times. The transfer is fast, but the connection may
not take place right away.

| 	         Perhaps you're refering to Usenet, which has uucp
| 	connections (intermittent and of questionable reliability) at its
| 	extremeties.  

  Dialups are obviously intermittent, but reliability is a function of
the sites through which the mail passes. We see very good reliability to
uucp sites, although it's a function of # of hops.

  Since I work on Email for the corporate gateway, I see a lot of
bounces, and I would rate bad addresses entered by the sender as the
highest cause, people changing their addresses second. uucp is slightly
less reliable than internet, but I think "questionable reliability"
gives an impression worse than the fact.

	bill davidsen		(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM)
  {uunet | philabs}!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me