We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles (2002)

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.

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.

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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

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...

A classic. It's like the hacker version of the SR-71 Blackbird speed check story [0]. Every time it comes up, I have to read it.

0: https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blac...

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

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...

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.

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.

  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.
  .

My favorite bug story. I created a curated list of similar bugs at https://500mile.email

…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.

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

This post always go back, like the doctors in Brazin using tilapia skin to heal burn wounds article.

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

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.

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

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

And here we are almost 25 years later.

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

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)

> 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.

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?

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

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

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

All time classic.

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

TIL about 'units'

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

Reminds me of the time I went to Ceti Alpha 6

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

A classic.

Related:

Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?

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

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