"Providers that fail to deliver mail in a timely way "are going to go
out of business," says Mike Watters, chief executive of Inverse
Network Technology Inc., a Santa Clara, Calif., company that tests
Internet performance.
"If e-mail doesn't work, the value of the Internet is dramatically
diminished," Mr. Watters says. According to a recent Inverse study, on
average, nearly 12% of e-mail takes over five minutes to deliver, and
some providers deliver 10% of their mail over an hour after it is
sent. At best, a message takes 4.3 minutes to arrive, and that's when
it is sent at about 4 a.m. PST, the study says; by 10 a.m., the
average message takes nearly 39 minutes to get to its
destination. Inverse automatically sent out at least 3,300 messages to
and from each Internet service. "
Other than that, the only other accurate bit sandwiched between the various
colorful but content-free anecdotes about MSN's slow electrons was:
"The gateways are "where reliability goes to hell," says Paul Hoffman,
co-director of the Internet Mail Consortium, a Santa Cruz, Calif.,
trade association that seeks to ensure compatibility of e-mail
software. Gateways, he says, can wreak havoc on the spreadsheets or
word-processing documents that are increasingly attached to e-mail. "A
bad gateway will mishandle the attachment and drop it on the floor or
turn it into something you can't read," he says."
Good going, Paul! [not to mention that it's absolutely true, too]
Rohit "media whore" Khare