The Speed of Email

Mike

Mike

Well-known Member
Location
London
I often wonder, what makes Emails so fast?

This morning I got an obviously bogus Email offering me something
very expensive, if I just fill out the attached survey, I hovered my cursor
over the, "Start Here", button and the address that showed at the bottom
left of my screen, was nothing like the address that the email came from!

So, I forwarded it to a Government site, called, "Report Phishing", when it
had gone, I deleted the bogus Email and when that went, the "Thank you
for reporting Phishing", reply, landed in my inbox, no matter how far it
travelled, the two-way journey, only took a second or so, I wonder how it
is possible to do so much and travel, at least 8 miles and back, if it only
went to Inner London.

I experienced a similar speed, when I sent a picture to a Customer Service
Agent, showing him the reason for my call, that also arrived at his desk,
which is 60 or 70 miles north of London, it arrived in a couple of seconds,
while we were speaking.

Mike.
 

Mike said:
I often wonder, what makes Emails so fast?
Click to expand...
One of the things that fascinates me... same concept that I could call you right now and say "Hey Mike!" ☎️ from half a world away and in real time. Photography is the same to me... to press a button and have the image "printed" onto film (old time photography... digital doesn't fascinate me as much.) 📷
 
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Mike said:
I often wonder, what makes Emails so fast?

This morning I got an obviously bogus Email offering me something
very expensive, if I just fill out the attached survey, I hovered my cursor
over the, "Start Here", button and the address that showed at the bottom
left of my screen, was nothing like the address that the email came from!

So, I forwarded it to a Government site, called, "Report Phishing", when it
had gone, I deleted the bogus Email and when that went, the "Thank you
for reporting Phishing", reply, landed in my inbox, no matter how far it
travelled, the two-way journey, only took a second or so, I wonder how it
is possible to do so much and travel, at least 8 miles and back, if it only
went to Inner London.

I experienced a similar speed, when I sent a picture to a Customer Service
Agent, showing him the reason for my call, that also arrived at his desk,
which is 60 or 70 miles north of London, it arrived in a couple of seconds,
while we were speaking.

Mike.
Click to expand...

Well, here's something that will blow your mind.

Data on a fiber cable (such as I have directly to my home), travels at.... wait for it.... 671,000,000 miles per hour. So yes, it's a bit fast.

Of course, there are a lot of variables and it's not all plain sailing. But it's a mind blowing stat.
 

Part of it is, a lot of them are automatic. When i pay a bill online the email acknowledging payment is often my inbox by the time i finish writing the confirmation # down in my account register. The payment triggers the response, it doesn't have to go to person who will add it to a list of things to do and compose the responses.

Even if you just forwarded the email and didn't have to fill out any info your email address would have been on the offending email and system would automatically acknowledge receiving it.
 
Email has been around a long time and the protocols for accepting, relaying, and retrieving it got pretty refined over that time. It's a pretty well optimized service today aside from the burdens of malware scanning and spam filtering. That's an arms race that never seems to end.
 
Web pages, on the other hand, have become bloated monstrosities by comparison. It's amazing they even work at all, and they consume 1000s or 10,000s of times as much bandwidth as email.
 
We humans are now living in a science, technology, telecom era where running messengers or carrier pigeons no longer have value. Instead the speed of communications is limited by the phenomenon of electromagnetic fields that move at near light speeds. On the Internet, many commercial websites use robotic analysis to instantly respond. That was first implemented in business phone systems and why when one calls many businesses, one is likely facing drilling through a labyrinth of annoying phone robot voices.
 
David777 said:
We humans are now living in a science, technology, telecom era where running messengers or carrier pigeons no longer have value. Instead the speed of communications is limited by the phenomenon of electromagnetic fields that move at near light speeds. On the Internet, many commercial websites use robotic analysis to instantly respond. That was first implemented in business phone systems and why when one calls many businesses, one is likely facing drilling through a labyrinth of annoying phone robot voices.
Click to expand...
I dunno what you're doing, David, but I find your posts difficult to read. They're not the default black that most everyone else posts in. They're kinda ... blue. And they hurt my eyes, so I don't read them.
 
My posts are dark blue and are also so on my other web boards. As I've related a few times, I don't plan to change that just because a minority of members chose to set up their Windows browsers or smartphones OS from defaults into dark modes. Instead others could learn how to switch between light and dark modes that is trivial.

Anytime someone on Windows has issues reading anyone's text, they can within moments, simply open Notepad then mouse Select the post text, Copy and Paste. With Android smartphones, toggle: Settings...Display...Display Theme...Light.
 
Understood, David. However, I'm not viewing the boards in dark mode.

Yes, I could always copy/paste your text (and only your text) into another app, but ... I'm even less inclined to now. But thanks for responding.
 
Apparently your text background is not the default White because if it was, my dark blue text would be easily visible. What kind of device are you using and what is the background color? If it is an iPad smartphone, I cannot help, so you would need to search the web on display background settings.

Generally for Windows desktop users, as a tech person, I advise people to ALWAYS have a small Notepad windows open on their Desktops as a scratchpad not primarily because it can take notes, but because it removes any text formatting from anything mouse Select and Copy. A huge basic computer function historically.
 
David, I didn't say your blue text wasn't visible. I said i hurts my eyes.

My browser background is white. I've just retired from 20 years of building websites, so I know a couple of things about browsers and coding.

That said, I have a far better text editor than Notepad but, honestly, it's just too much hassle for this.

Anyway, I think we've run this side discussion about as far as it should go.
 

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