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Subject: North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio
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- From: the fluffy bunny <the.fluffy.bunny@juno.com>
- To: nafex@egroups.com
- Subject: Re: [nafex] Delayed postings, why?
- Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 20:16:47 -0400
Kevin(Ed Forest) wrote:
Some of my messages appear a week or so after I post them. What's going
on?
My reply:
(all):
Cyber space is a mysterious place, things happen in cyberspace that seem
at the surface contrary to common sense. One of these typical "cyber
mysteries" is why does it take so long for my e-mail to post, and more
interestingly why is it some people reply to my e-mail before it even
reaches the list? Yes, it is actually fairly common for you to receive
a reply to an e-mail before you have even read the original e-mail.
Here, in layman terms is what is going on.
The Internet was originally conceived as a means of keeping the United
States defensive and offensive military systems functioning in the event
of debilitating damage to known computer installations. As a result the
"net" is actually a whole mess of computers, running on disparate
operating systems and physical computers that actually "do business"
thought a common communication protocol.
The general intention of the Internet is to provide redundant
communication to military systems...as a result the "Internet" pretty
much manages itself without much human intervention. If one computer in
the system goes down or is removed the "net" itself simply reroutes
traffic to another available computer. Think of the Internet as a
glorified traffic cop that's purpose is to keep data flowing...is one
street(computer) is blocked they simply route traffic another way.
Well fast forward to the "net today"...what once used to be simple data
exchanges that took place across the net now includes heavy graphics
traffic, or intense data usage. At times this use creates bottlenecks in
the system and the traffic cop begins to reroute things. What happens
is your e-mail from Chicago to St. Louis might end up getting their by
way of Australia...this creates a bizarre situation where you might post
an e-mail to a list processor(like our board list) and the e-mail takes a
real long time to find its way to the list, or may take a long time to
leave the list domain and get out to all recipients. One of the
stranger things that might happen is your e-mail hits the list server
which promptly sends it out to all recipients, but some of them go by the
way of Australia or China instead of the more direct Chicago to St. Louis
route...in this case some people might manage to reply to the initial
post before it is even seen by the poster!!!
As technology has moved forward and financial transactions have gained
prominence a new type of software that combines with communication
protocols has been developed. This software is a form of middleware, and
its newest iterations contains the nebulous ability to assure delivery of
messages. While this is needed in financial transactions many e-mail
systems have utilized the technology under the mistaken impression that
it actually improves performance. It does not, as by its nature it will
try and try to send a message to the same server until the transaction
completes, instead of allowing the servers to reroute themselves as
intended. So threw the mysteries of cyberspace your e-mails may
inadvertently get trapped on a server that is trying to forward your
message to another "named" server, and that server only. In this case
your e-mail message may get tied up until the queue gets full and alerts
the operator, or until the server is connected to the net again.
Like I said the "net" is a strange place...seemingly mysterious things
happen...
But all in all, this list is operating as expected...it is the nature of
the "net"...
Wishing all of you the best,
Kevin(the "techno" rabbit)Mathews
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- Re: [nafex] Delayed postings, why?, the fluffy bunny, 05/31/2000
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