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On Thursday 25 October 2007 09:59:58 Laurence Bates wrote: > The email system is essential for the types of pre-grant proposal > collaboration. The final copy is probably Fed-ex'd but email forms the > bulk of the transactions that take place in developing our grant proposals. > > All of which seems to me to be a mute point. Why on earth is anyone > arguing that email should be slow? Ten to fifteen years ago the bandwidths > between email sites were such that email was slow of necessity. Today, > email is a drop in the bandwidth bucket and rather than expecting delays we > should be much more in tune with the common expectation that email is close > to immediate. CPU problems in filtering spam I can understand but > intentional built-in delays are IMHO incompatible with 21st century > organizational practices. This is the NOW generation, not the > maybe-sometime crew and email for business, group scheduling and > collaboration should be delivered NOW except in cases of exceptional > technical constraint or equipment failure. Quite frankly, if I have to > wait 30 seconds for some software company to send me a software activation > code via email, that's already too long. I don't think anyone is saying that it should be slow, just that there are lots of reasons it can be. I'm not sure you appreciate the impact that spam is having on large systems. No one I've talked to who has tried to look at the spam content of their email stream has said spam is less than 85%, and a few report 96%+. This puts an enourmous strain on systems. When things are working correctly, I can usually get a quick email for something like conformation of an account creation in 10 seconds. But things don't always work out like that. The "intentional delays" are one of the reasons you *are* able to get mail. Greylisting is very likely the single biggest asset to fast email delivery these days. MSU's email would be far worse without it. --STeve Andre' Political Science