Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?

> There’s a lot to the story that’s obviously made up...

Obviously? I think I've had this phone call myself a few times, although in my experience it was never from a statistician and they didn't give me as much data, but I'm pretty sure the story is mostly accurate.

> I think this is nonsense... why would an invalid or incomplete sendmail configuration default to three milliseconds?

This is a wonderful question, and perhaps much more interesting than anything else in the page, but first, let's reproduce the timing;

My desktop, a 2017 Xeon E7-8880 (144 cores of 2.3ghz; 1tb ram) with a load of 2.26 at this moment:

    $ time sleep 0.001
    real    0m0.004s
    user    0m0.001s
    sys     0m0.003s

On my i9-10900k (3.7ghz) current load of 3,31:

    $ time sleep 0.001

    real    0m0,002s
    user    0m0,000s
    sys     0m0,001s

(In case you think I'm measuring exec; time /bin/echo returns 0's on both machine)

Now as to why this is? Well in order to understand that, you need to understand how connect() actually works, and how to create a timeout for connect(). Those skilled in the art know you've got a number of choices on how to do it, but they all involve multiple steps because connect() does not take a timeout as an argument. Here's one way (not too different than what sendmail does/did):

    fcntl(f,F_SETFL,O_NONBLOCK);
    if(-1==connect(f,...)&&errno==EWOULDBLOCK){
      fd_set a;FD_ZERO(&a);FD_SET(f,&a);
      if(!select(f+1,&a,&a,NULL,{.tv_sec=0,.tv_usec=0})) {
        close(f);return error;
      }
    }

If you read this carefully, you only need to ask yourself how much time can pass between the top of connect() and the bottom of select(), and if you think it is zero like tedu does, you might probably have the same surprise: Computers are not abstract machines, but made out of matter and powered by energy and thus subject to the laws of physics, and so everything takes time.

For others, the surprise might be that it's still 3msec over twenty years later, and I think that is a much more interesting subject to explore than whether the speed of light exists.

> Obviously? I think I've had this phone call myself a few times, although in my experience it was never from a statistician and they didn't give me as much data, but I'm pretty sure the story is mostly accurate.

Yeah, the original retelling even states up-front:

> The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining.

It's pretty common to alter minor details of stories in order to make them easier to follow, not to mention that the entire account is also written several years after it happened, when details are presumably less likely to be completely accurate. Obviously the dialogue is reconstructive for narrative ease; no reader would look at that and assume it's intended to be a verbatim transcript.

Unless the author here can cite specific things that make it truly impossible for anything of that shape to have occurred, I'm not seeing anything that justifies the conclusion "there's a lot to the story that's obviously made up".