[tragic]

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.

[mtdewcmu]

I think it had a little bit to do with the users being statistics professors, too. That might just be the ideal background for writing bug reports.

[userbinator]

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.