Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?

Nostalgia for the “500-mile email” and related folklore

• Many commenters celebrate the original story as one of the “classic” internet/sysadmin tales, still delightful even after multiple rereads.
• People share similar “impossible-seeming” bug stories: Wi-Fi only working in rain or winter, hardware failing when someone stands up, thermostats fooled by server fans, scanners that only work when a child is awake, etc.
• Links to other famous anecdotes (magic/more-magic switches, “car allergic to vanilla ice cream,” weird garbage collection stories, “magic” debugging tales) are collected, with at least one site aggregating such stories.

Clarifying the joke and technical background

• Some readers admit they “don’t get it”; others explain that 500 miles comes from the distance light (or signals) can travel in ~3ms, matching a too-short timeout.
• There’s discussion of speed of light in different media (fiber vs copper), noting practical limits for latency-sensitive systems (e.g., high-frequency trading).
• Several comments dig into how connect() timeouts actually work: non-blocking sockets plus select()/poll() with a 0 timeout, and how real systems still show ~3ms minimum practical delay even with “0ms” timeouts.
• Debate appears over whether the article misread the original (treating 3ms as an explicit configured timeout rather than emergent behavior of a zero timeout plus system overhead).

Truth vs embellishment of the original story

• One camp insists the story basically happened as told, aside from acknowledged minor narrative tweaks; they emphasize that involved people are still alive and the account was posted to a sysadmin list, not as fiction.
• Another camp argues that much of it feels invented or heavily dramatized, pointing to the author’s own disclaimer about adjusted details and to the job-hunting note at the end as evidence of storytelling intent.
• Multiple commenters are irritated that the new article misstates basic facts (e.g., calling the protagonist a university president instead of a department chair) and then labels “a lot of the story” as “obviously made up.”

Modern context: centralization and operational realities

• Some expected the 2025 angle to be about email centralization: today many universities and organizations host email and web on big cloud providers, so mail often never leaves a single datacenter.
• Others discuss why institutions outsource email (cost of staff, spam and blacklisting risk, maintenance headaches).
• A modern real-world parallel: an iOS app with a too-short TLS timeout (~500ms) that fails for users with high latency (e.g., Australia), showing similar pathologies still happen.

Tooling and nerd-sniping (units, qalc, etc.)

• A subthread focuses on the units command, its * and / outputs, and use-cases for quick real-world conversions.
• Alternatives like qalc and WolframAlpha are mentioned, along with creative example queries (gold sphere value, pipeline flow rates, data rates, annual time calculations).