[fbnt]

Shouldn't this account for a round trip, and the speed through copper (~ 2/3rd of the speed of light)? That would lower the radius to much more than 500 miles.

[dantillberg]

I had this thought when reading this before as well. I imagine that the "3 milliseconds" they determined from testing was a typical number, maybe the median/mean, and that the actual timeout varied considerably depending on CPU load at that particular moment. Add in a number of retries for the server to attempt sending each email, and the effective timeout might have been a few milliseconds more... or at least it must have been, because `(2 * 500 miles) / (2/3 speed of light)` works out to about 8 milliseconds (where the 2X is for the round trip, and 2/3 is a rough multiplier for the speed of light traveling in either copper or optical fiber).

[ErrantX]

The FAQ answers this question. Basically; it was a long time ago, and the point of the story isn't in the detail. :)

http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html