Also, that it's pretty clear that they were only able to do so because they had limited technical knowledge of email: to someone who runs a mail server, the idea of email not getting further than 500 miles is ridiculous and absurd. To someone not used to it, not so much...
I'm sure there's a cute name for this specific variety of irony, but I don't know what it is.
to someone who runs a mail server, the idea of email not getting further than 500 miles is ridiculous and absurd
Not really, unless that someone doesn't know about the structure of networks. My first two hypotheses after reading the problem description were routing anomalies and timeouts.
That other story about the car and vanilla ice cream, on the other hand, is a great example of unintended correlation != causation.
Fun article, but I don't completely buy the conclusion. The propagation speed of cat-5, coax and fiber optic cable all fall in the neighborhood of ~60-70% the speed of light in vacuum. Also it's very unlikeliness to have anything resembling a straight line path from the mail server to the destination. If the connections were aborted in a bit over 3ms you would have much shorter range than 500 miles, I'd guess something like 1/4 to 1/2 that distance between the lower propagation speed and indirect path.
The timeout was unlikely to be 3ms. A 100hz clock would give you a timeout of 10ms. Also, the timeout needs to cover the distance in both directions. Half of 10ms is 5ms, which is just about enough for a 60% of c transmission to go 500 miles.
http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~smann/IceCream/humor.html