Re: Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours

From: Helen Dynda (olddad66@runestone.net)
Thu Nov 7 20:54:36 2002


Dear Cathy, Thank you for letting me know!! I've been on the Internet for only 5 years - so I know I have a lot more to learn!!

You not only have a lot of Internet experience; but I've noticed that you share a lot of wisdom on the IAS MB too. Thank you for your willingness to shared in the past.

Helen D.

~ ~ ~ ~

At Thu, 7 Nov 2002, cathy:- wrote:

Helen, that is a standard internet message that indicates that there is a slow connection somewhere. If the message is really not going to go through, you'll get another message at 48 hours and then one after a week. So if you get a message after 4 hours and then no further messages it means that your mail (finally) got through after a delay.

Most of the time when an email has an error in the address it "bounces" back immediately with an error. To use Pascale's address as and example, if there was an error with the "nevinvlaun" username then you would get a message from the mail program on megatropic.com saying that it had no idea who "nevinvlaun" was. But the "Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours" means that megatropic.com has been unreachable for 4 hours. The mail programs automatically keep trying, and if megatropic.com appears later, then it will attempt to deliver the mail. If you get no further error messages, it's because it probably succeeded.

I've been on the internet for about 14 years now, and that message used to be a lot more common in the old days of slow connections, when many computers still connected via dialup and they only connected at night when the phone rates were lower. Recently the internet has been having intermittant outages because of the Worldcom bankruptcy. A large amount of internet backbone equipment is scattered about the whole country in local phone company equipment rooms, but is owned and maintained by Worldcom. Mostly it works fine for months and months but occasionally something goes on the blink. So when that happens the local people will call the tech hotline number -- and discover that the tech office they used before has been shut down. So then it takes them a couple of hours to figure out who they are supposed to call to come fix the problem...

I know, way more information about the internet than you ever wanted to know! Did you know that the symbol of the internet is a chorus line of dancing bears? This is because of an old saying (Mark Twain maybe?) that goes something like, "With a dancing bear it's not the artistry of the dance which is impressive, but that the bear can dance at all!" The people who created the internet are continuously amazed that this thing works at all, you know! :o)


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