[HN Gopher] We can't send mail farther than 500 miles (2002)
___________________________________________________________________
We can't send mail farther than 500 miles (2002)
See also https://ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
Author : giancarlostoro
Score : 631 points
Date : 2026-01-29 03:58 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.mit.edu)
| gnabgib wrote:
| 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
| dang wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I can say that a new user (me) did learn the classic (this).
| Leptonmaniac wrote:
| Congratulations! You are one of today's ten thousand!
|
| Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/
| nakedneuron wrote:
| It's classics all the way down.
| davidcollantes wrote:
| > 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!
|
| It would be nice if HN would simply "float" to the front page
| the classics, a year or two after their submission. That
| would avoid duplication (specially of comments!), and allow
| people in the lucky 10,000 group know about it.
| dang wrote:
| I hear you from a technical point of view (deduplication!)
| but I think the chaos and ferment have creative qualities
| too.
| bobjordan wrote:
| 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.
| otherme123 wrote:
| One of the lucky 10,000! https://xkcd.com/1053/
| oofbey wrote:
| Such a refreshingly good attitude!
| cantalopes wrote:
| I was one of the lucky ones today
| Semaphor wrote:
| 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
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| That story has been repeated in various places for decades
| now.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| AI bots on dead internet will bring them up and have an
| earnest metallic laughter together.
| BadBadJellyBean wrote:
| And still a treat. I love that story.
| teekert wrote:
| I believe I'm up for submitting it in a couple of months.
| mcv wrote:
| I thought it sounded familiar. Still a good read.
| wkjagt wrote:
| 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 :-)
| mbac32768 wrote:
| Every time see this story I think "oh, this is the story
| about the packet TTLs being set stupidly low or something but
| you wouldn't be able to narrow that exactly to 500 miles" and
| have to click and learn again the the first time it's about
| the connection timeout being set stupidly low.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| A classic.
|
| Related:
|
| _Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466030
| jofzar wrote:
| All time classic.
| rootsudo wrote:
| I never realized this was 2002 and when I first read it, how new
| it was.
|
| And here we are almost 25 years later.
| dbtablesorrows wrote:
| > 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.
| rfarley04 wrote:
| 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)
| reaperducer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| 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...
| DWakefield wrote:
| I had a chance to meet Cliff Stoll a couple summers ago. He was
| giving a presentation to a quilt society and it was great. If
| you ever have a chance to see him in person, no matter the
| topic, you will be greatly rewarded! He is such an energetic
| and enthusiastic person and he finds the beauty in all sorts of
| everyday things. I was captivated by him the entire time on a
| topic I only had a passing interest in at the beginning.
| rented_mule wrote:
| 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.
| nakedneuron wrote:
| Seems like 'he' came out without damage, too :)
| Dban1 wrote:
| My mouse doesn't do that
| jacquesm wrote:
| Finally a real computer mouse! What a funny story :)
| ljf wrote:
| 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/
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| > 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
| xg15 wrote:
| OT, but I find this a perfect example why "data-driven
| design" is an empty term if you don't know what it's being
| designed _for_ - i.e. what metrics are used to evaluate it
| in the end.
|
| Both, optimizing for ease of shopping and optimizing for
| stringing the customer along as long as possible rely on
| the same purchase data - they just use diametrically
| opposite metrics for evaluation.
| rhplus wrote:
| I can hear Click and Clack, the Tappett Brothers, hooting and
| guffawing on Car Talk as I'm reading this Snopes article!
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| Why'd you have to make me sad.
| jaapz wrote:
| 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
| rkomorn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's also more moth than reality.
|
| Moths are, technically [0], not bugs.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemiptera
| direwolf20 wrote:
| I don't think there's a precise scientific definition of
| "bug"
| peaseagee wrote:
| 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".
| eloisant wrote:
| So moths are not bugs because they're "true bugs"? How
| does it make sense?
| ktm5j wrote:
| Apparently they're not "true bugs", the comment you
| replied to isn't claiming that they are.
| rkomorn wrote:
| This is the kind of response I appreciate. Thank you!
| vidarh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Right, good correction. It's the origin part that's the
| myth.
| moomin wrote:
| Too many people remember the "bug" story as "Grace Hopper
| invented the term 'bug'" when the real takeaway is "Grace
| Hopper was very funny."
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| And in colloquial speak, a grasshopper is, of course, a
| bug.
| adornKey wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| In another world, I guess bugs would be called mice. But then
| what would we call mice?
| mbac32768 wrote:
| This is almost the origin story for the EDM producer deadmau5's
| name.
| raegis wrote:
| I immediately did a "apt install units". Very cool!
| tad_tough_anne wrote:
| I was disappointed to find Arch doesn't have it. :(
| rnestler wrote:
| It has it in the AUR:
| https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/units
| crumpled wrote:
| I did as well. I found a bug right away. If I use "units" the
| resulting calculations are reversed.
|
| You have: 1 mile You want: kilometers * 1.609344 / 0.62137119
|
| You have: 1 unit You want: 1.609344 units * 0.62137119 /
| 1.609344
| moring wrote:
| 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.
| subscribed wrote:
| Fantastic comment. Indeed.
| alex-moon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| (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 wrote:
| I guess people won't feel judged or shamed for not knowing
| something from an LLM.
| blast wrote:
| It helps to have a statistician and a geostatistician as your
| clients!
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I do wonder if they already had a feeling it was not supposed
| to work that way hence the info gathering. This is one of my
| favorite all time IT stories because the client was right,
| and the engineer was left almost going crazy.
|
| When I was a Junior I asked an honest question to the senior
| I was working with at the time, great dude, I basically asked
| him because everyone joked about the "works on my machine"
| crowd, so I said, so what the heck do I do if it only works
| on my machine? He said you have to figure out what's
| different. It sounds obvious or simple, but if you go with
| that mindset, when someone's stuck in the "it works on my
| machine idk why" sure enough I ask "what is DIFFERENT from
| your machine and this one?" and it almost always leads to the
| right answers. It triggers something in our brains. I usually
| follow up whats different with "what was the last change?" in
| the case of a production issue.
| austinallegro wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.)
| Izkata wrote:
| From and To should be repeated below DATA, those are the
| actual email headers. And From at least doesn't need to
| match MAIL FROM.
| K-Wall wrote:
| Everytime this pops up I immediately think of this classic:
| https://www.cartalk.com/radio/puzzler/flavors
| glenngillen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| topranks wrote:
| 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.
| Andr2Andr wrote:
| Here is another classic: wrong password when standing.
| https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...
| dosshell wrote:
| This is a good read! and something i have in the back of my
| head when debugging spooky bugs.
| Bengalilol wrote:
| This story travels at light speed and will never get old.
| fareesh wrote:
| Reminds me of the time I went to Ceti Alpha 6
| rustyhancock wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There's an FAQ here:
| https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
| rustyhancock wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It was a fake story he made up to help in his job search. Don't
| expect any of the details to add up.
| qwertox wrote:
| "Thankfully, it failed." So relatable, in general, when debugging
| systems.
| AGivant wrote:
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shoot-me-kangaroo-down-spo...
| markstos wrote:
| 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.
| dmurray wrote:
| 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...
| aiahs wrote:
| If you manage to find out what the cause is, I'd love to hear
| it.
| jerf wrote:
| 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.
| amalcon wrote:
| 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.
| gue-ni wrote:
| TIL about 'units'
| stego-tech wrote:
| ...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.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| This is one of my favorite Old Internet tales. It's up there with
| "Mel, The Real Programmer."
| burningChrome wrote:
| Absolute classic if anybody else is interested in reading:
|
| https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html
|
| Mel was for sure on another level:
|
| _It was a long time before I understood that remark. Since Mel
| knew the numerical value of every operation code, and assigned
| his own drum addresses, every instruction he wrote could also
| be considered a numerical constant. He could pick up an earlier
| "add" instruction, say, and multiply by it, if it had the right
| numeric value. His code was not easy for someone else to
| modify._
| drummojg wrote:
| I also enjoy the one about testing bird strike tolerances with
| store-bought chicken.
| arbirk wrote:
| Now someone post the "we can't print on Tuesdays story" too
| wang_li wrote:
| There's also the "magic" and "more magic" switch.
|
| https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html
| euparkeria wrote:
| This post always go back, like the doctors in Brazin using
| tilapia skin to heal burn wounds article.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| 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...
| hmhrex wrote:
| My favorite bug story. I created a curated list of similar bugs
| at https://500mile.email
| harimau777 wrote:
| I love that the statistics department decided not to contact IT
| until they had enough data to be statistically significant!
| avipars wrote:
| Heisenbug
| diebillionaires wrote:
| This made me LOL so many times.
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