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▲ We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles (2002)(web.mit.edu)
536 points by giancarlostoro 12 hours ago | 82 comments

See also https://ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html

▲rented_mule 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

About the same time the 500-mile email problem happened (mid 1990s), I had a difficult to understand issue with my office PC. Every morning, I'd come in, slide my hard drive sled in, and turn the computer on. We had 128 Kbps ISDN internet at the office and I had the same at home, but that was too slow to do much work. So I'd take the drive home so I could work at night, especially in the winter when the office was too cold at night.

Suddenly one winter morning, the PC wouldn't boot. I had to run to a meeting. When I got back, I turned the PC off and on again and everything was fine. The next morning, the same thing happened. The third day, I didn't have a meeting. I turned it off and back on, still no boot. I'd gotten in late, so I just turned it off and took an early lunch. When I got back, it still wouldn't boot. But I had a meeting, so I ran to that, leaving the computer on. When I got back, it booted fine.

The next morning, same thing. I decided to look inside, not having any idea what might cause such symptoms. As I took the shell off, a tiny mouse came out, jump off my desk, and ran across my lap before jumping on the floor and scurrying out of sight. From inside the computer came the smell of mouse urine. Apparently he'd been crawling in through the open drive bay to keep warm every night, and urinating while he was in there. Once the computer had been on for a while, the heat and airflow would dry it out enough to eliminate whatever electrical short was keeping it from booting. I went to the store and bought an empty drive sled to put in the drive bay whenever I took my drive out, and the problem never came back. I felt lucky that the liquid didn't cause permanent damage.

▲ljf 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Someone posted a similar story on one of the other times the 500 mile email was posted - where a car would fail to start if the owner bought strawberry ice-cream from the store, but would work if they have vanilla. I love the processes that go into finding the actual issue (regardless of if the ice cream story is true!): https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/

▲rhplus 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I can hear Click and Clack, the Tappett Brothers, hooting and guffawing on Car Talk as I’m reading this Snopes article!

▲PunchyHamster 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Vanilla, being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case at the front of the store for quick pickup.

wish modern stores optimized for customer convenience instead of seeing most shelves along the way to the usual

▲jacquesm 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Finally a real computer mouse! What a funny story :)

▲adornKey 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Mice can fit through tiny holes. An old rule says that if a pencil can get through - a mouse will get through. Some mice even fly. I once had a bat clinging on my good old CAT cable. So even leaving windows open at night might affect bandwidth...

Another classic is the "Frog on Keyboard error". Software developers have to be prepared for everything...

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Classic-WTF-Cursed-and-ReCu...

▲WaitWaitWha 23 minutes ago | parent [-]

There used to be an option called "Cat guard" built into several historical (BBS ) software. On (and cannot remember the name) one software that did synchronization with other networks (e.g., FIDO, uunet) it was considered a major feature.

Primary purpose was to lock the keyboard so when the cat walked all over it, it would not disconnect.

▲Dban1 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My mouse doesn't do that

▲jaapz 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Kind of similar to the story about the origins of the word "bug" in software

If this would have caught on we might have called bugs mice

▲moomin 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Too many people remember the “bug” story as “Grace Hopper invented the term ‘bug’” when the real takeaway is “Grace Hopper was very funny.”

▲rkomorn 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Isn't that story more myth than reality?

The history section of the Wikipedia entry for "bug" [1] suggests it predates computers by decades.

1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_(engineering)

▲bregma 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's also more moth than reality.

Moths are, technically [0], not bugs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemiptera

▲direwolf20 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think there's a precise scientific definition of "bug"

▲peaseagee 22 minutes ago | parent [-]

Yes and no. There's a group called "true bugs" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemiptera as linked above). "Bug" in the common sense doesn't have a precise definition (small arthropod that may or may not be a pest to humans is about as precise as I feel I can get), but there _is_ a scientific definition of "true bug".

▲rkomorn 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is the kind of response I appreciate. Thank you!

▲vidarh 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The actual story is not myth. It just isn't the origin of the term.

Hopper's note didn't suggest the word was new, but was funny exactly because it was not.

▲rkomorn 36 minutes ago | parent [-]

Right, good correction. It's the origin part that's the myth.

▲nakedneuron 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Seems like 'he' came out without damage, too :)

▲dfxm12 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

In another world, I guess bugs would be called mice. But then what would be call mice?

▲moring 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

He doesn't give the chairman due credit, IMHO. The chairman collected information to help solve the problem AND it actually was the information needed. Without it, the author might look for "randomly unreachable servers" for a long time.

It's almost raw data -- exactly what you would wish for. By lecturing people that "email does not work that way", next time you either get no data at all because people don't even try, or no data because people hide it thinking email doesn't work that way, or a misguided conclusion when a layman tries to make a better guess at the cause of the problem.

▲alex-moon 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Absolutely. It's one of my all time favourites stories and this is pretty much the reason why. I wish my users gave me such specific steps to reproduce!

▲PunchyHamster 5 hours ago | parent [-]

What's my recent annoyance is that users will describe their problem in great detail if they are talking to LLM, yet same people make just as shit support tickets as before

▲moring 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

(1) disguise as an LLM to have them give better problem descriptions to you (2) provide an LLM for your users that lets you read their chat to understand their problem

and:

(3) try to understand why they are communicating differently to an LLM. Immediate replies? Different feelings knowing they don't talk to a human? Genuinely better help? Not getting treated as stupid?

All or none of these may be true, but if it's consistent behaviour then there is a reason for it.

▲hiccuphippo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I guess people won't feel judged or shamed for not knowing something from an LLM.

▲subscribed 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Fantastic comment. Indeed.

▲gnabgib 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Popular in:

2023 (1164 points, 198 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37576633

2020 (1034 points, 136 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775404

2015 (915 points, 140 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338708

▲bobjordan 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

These kind of posts are why I check HN pretty much every day for 15+ yrs now. Hard to believe I've missed this one. Glad I caught it this time! This posts reminds me to stay humble and avoid jumping to conclusions without analysis.

▲PunchyHamster 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That story has been repeated in various places for decades now.

▲otherme123 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

One of the lucky 10,000! https://xkcd.com/1053/

▲Semaphor 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think I’ve been one of those 2 or 3 times for this story. Read it, forgot it, read it again and only remembered after some time :D

▲cantalopes 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I was one of the lucky ones today

▲oofbey 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Such a refreshingly good attitude!

▲IG_Semmelweiss 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder when we will see a timeless classic like this on HN, but for AI.

We can then poke some fun at what AI did, what went wrong, and our incredibly illogical "debug" of AI

▲varjag 8 hours ago | parent [-]

AI bots on dead internet will bring them up and have an earnest metallic laughter together.

▲dang 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You guys beat me to it - I was working on the list!

Btw for those wondering about reposts: reposts on HN are just fine after a year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), and reposts of classics every now and then are good because it's important for new users to learn the classics!

Can an email go 500 miles in 2025? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466030 - July 2025 (122 comments)

Can’t send email more than 500 miles (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37576633 - Sept 2023 (198 comments)

The case of the 500-mile email (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29213064 - Nov 2021 (93 comments)

We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775404 - July 2020 (135 comments)

500 miles (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18675375 - Dec 2018 (32 comments)

We can't send mail more than 500 miles - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17602158 - July 2018 (1 comment)

The case of the 500-mile email (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14676835 - July 2017 (56 comments)

Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13347058 - Jan 2017 (82 comments)

The case of the 500-mile email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10305377 - Sept 2015 (1 comment)

The 500-mile email (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338708 - April 2015 (139 comments)

The case of the 500-mile email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2701063 - June 2011 (18 comments)

The case of the 500-mile email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1293652 - April 2010 (24 comments)

The case of the 500-mile email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385068 - Dec 2008 (28 comments)

The case of the 500-mile email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123489 - Feb 2008 (7 comments)

▲Abh1Works 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I can say that a new user (me) did learn the classic (this).

▲Leptonmaniac 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Congratulations! You are one of today's ten thousand!

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/

▲nakedneuron 6 hours ago | parent [-]

It's classics all the way down.

▲wkjagt 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This gets posted just infrequently enough that I remember that I've read it before but forget why those emails weren't delivered, so I read it every time :-)

▲teekert 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I believe I'm up for submitting it in a couple of months.

▲BadBadJellyBean 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And still a treat. I love that story.

▲mcv 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I thought it sounded familiar. Still a good read.

▲dmurray 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Last night I downloaded a TV episode and played it in VLC. 30 seconds in, the power failed. Fine, it's an old laptop I'm using as a media server, battery is long dead - this never happened before but maybe something is loose. I checked the power supply and restarted it. It failed again at the same point in the video, and again a third time. Something about that video causes my laptop to die.

I turned it off and went to bed. Maybe I'll troubleshoot it today. But I'd love to understand what could have happened. The closest thing I know of is the Janet Jackson video that could crash hard drives [0]. In this case the sound was playing on a different device (my TV) so I don't think it's the same explanation.

For extra weirdness, the episode was Black Mirror S7E01. Exactly the kind of thing the creators would like to build into a Black Mirror episode.

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220816-00/?p=10...

▲amalcon 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Some of these video codecs have pathological cases that might be maxing out your video while doing the decoding. If you're only using it as a media server, that might exceed the (possibly age-degraded) capacity of your power supply. Replacing the power supply might help in that case.

It's also possible that something in a particular frame is triggering a bug in your driver and crashing that way. In that case, your best bet might be to transcode the video to a different codec or something.

Maybe your particular video download is from an entirely trustworthy source, but it's not unheard of that untrustworthy folks will modify a file with the intent of causing this to happen.

▲jerf an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Dying on the exact same frame, or just generally in the same spot?

In the case of the latter my first thought would be thermals. Different video codecs have significantly different decoding costs, and may also stress different parts of your system. You could check for that by playing that same video but not starting at the beginning and see if it's the same duration. Or jump to just before it dies and see if it plays through.

If by "downloaded" you mean The High Seas, those who provision the high seas are often on the cutting edge of using codecs with every last feature turned on to make the videos smaller to squeeze every last bit out of the encodings that they can, which can make them unusually expensive to decode. Or so I've heard.

▲aiahs 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you manage to find out what the cause is, I'd love to hear it.

▲glenngillen 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Reminds me of this classic that resurfaces here every few years: if I buy vanilla ice cream my car won’t start https://www.netscrap.com/netscrap_detail.cfm?scrap_id=501

▲EE84M3i 6 hours ago | parent [-]

For me, it brings to mind the SR-71 speedcheck story just as a similar classic. https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blac...

▲jcgrillo 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This, Stalking the Wiley Hacker[1], and others were the stories that got me into computers. I wish so much the experience of working in this industry hadn't so thoroughly annihilated the joy they once brought.

[1] https://archive.org/details/5626281-Clifford-Stoll-Communica...

▲markstos 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I once had a computer that would turn itself off when I left the room to get a drink.

Turned out be an old building with loose floorboard. The force of standing up was just enough to short out a failing power supply.

▲stego-tech 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

…I almost choked on my breakfast bacon reading this. This is some fabulous “greybeard wizard” lore from the early days of the WWW that I just love hearing about.

Bless OP for sharing this gem today. I needed the laughter.

▲raegis 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I immediately did a "apt install units". Very cool!

▲tad_tough_anne 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I was disappointed to find Arch doesn't have it. :(

▲rnestler 5 hours ago | parent [-]

It has it in the AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/units

▲austinallegro 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How about sending mail 500 miles more?

Just to be the man/woman/non-binary who sends mail 500 miles to your front door?

You had me at EHL0.

▲jedberg 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> You had me at EHL0.

You just reminded me of my time working at Sendmail, where I often had to telnet to port 25 of some machine, and pretend to be a mail server sending email.

I used to be able to send all the commands without having to look them up. Not sure I could still do that today.

▲frumplestlatz 9 hours ago | parent [-]

I think can still do it, 30 years after I last had to. The trauma of debugging sendmail m4 config issues for hours while the company e-mail remained dysfunctional has permanently etched it into my mind.

  EHLO example.com
  MAIL FROM:<foo@example.com>
  RCPT TO:<bar@example.com>
  DATA
  Subject: Hello, World

  I have crawled through the depths of hell to deliver unto you this message.
  .
Wietse Venema saved us all.
▲eqvinox 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I haven't worked at sendmail or even anything e-mail related, and I can do that… just enough e-mail fixing as side work. Let's call it sysadmin calluses.

What made me stumble recently was having to talk LMTP to fix a mailman setup. Cheeky fuckers changed EHLO into LHLO for LMTP. (To avoid any mixups between the protocols, which is fair.)

▲qwertox 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Thankfully, it failed." So relatable, in general, when debugging systems.

▲wang_li 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's also the "magic" and "more magic" switch.

https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html

▲topranks 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So funny to think about this now.

Our email systems are mostly mediated by giant hyper-scale companies (Microsoft, Google etc). The location of mail servers being where the recipient is seems quaint (and wonderfully decentralised).

And even if we do manage our own servers they are automated, and apps often containerised. Nobody ends up with older MTA due to an OS upgrade.

Remember reading this like 20 years ago nice to see it again.

▲AGivant 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shoot-me-kangaroo-down-spo...

▲K-Wall 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Everytime this pops up I immediately think of this classic: https://www.cartalk.com/radio/puzzler/flavors

▲rootsudo 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I never realized this was 2002 and when I first read it, how new it was.

And here we are almost 25 years later.

▲Andr2Andr 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Here is another classic: wrong password when standing. https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...

▲dosshell 6 hours ago | parent [-]

This is a good read! and something i have in the back of my head when debugging spooky bugs.

▲rfarley04 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Never get tired of seeing this resurface every once and a while. There needs to be a /greatest for posts like these (while still allowing people to repost them every so often)

▲dbtablesorrows 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It hadn't been altered -- it was a sendmail.cf I had written. And I was fairly certain I hadn't enabled the "FAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES" option.

This is gold.

▲rustyhancock 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm sure this part of the "boring details" omitted.

But what was the actual timeout and distance?

Presumably 60-70% VF of PVC coated copper?

So a 5ms timeout would be a 500mile run?

▲javierbg95 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's an FAQ here: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html

▲rustyhancock 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Honestly burst out laughing as I saw the FAQ section covering the timeout.

Thanks for sharing the link.

The ultimate explanation that he just pinged known distances to calculate the time and distance relation is actually brilliant I'm not sure it would have occured to me particularly quickly to just experiment.

▲EnPissant 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It was a fake story he made up to help in his job search. Don't expect any of the details to add up.

▲ubermonkey 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is one of my favorite Old Internet tales. It's up there with "Mel, The Real Programmer."

▲reaperducer 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

FAQ about this, which answers such questions as "Did this actually happen, or were you just spinning a yarn?"

https://ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html

▲silisili 8 hours ago | parent [-]

As many times as I've read this story, I've never come across this.

Pity, as the constant handwaving in the answers makes the entire thing seem made up.

▲thrdbndndn 7 hours ago | parent [-]

What I don't get is how the author can't pin the year down to anything narrower than "between 1994 and 1997," especially considering he wrote the article in 2002: only a few years later.

I'm not at all implying the story was fake; just this particular thing feels weird.

▲gue-ni 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

TIL about 'units'

▲jofzar 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

All time classic.

▲fareesh 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Reminds me of the time I went to Ceti Alpha 6

▲Bengalilol 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This story travels at light speed and will never get old.

▲arbirk 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Now someone post the "we can't print on Tuesdays story" too

▲ChrisArchitect 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A classic.

Related:

Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466030