3 ms·

This reminds me of back when e-mail clients would store your outgoing e-mails in the "outbox" waiting for the next time you dialed in. Nowadays networked softwa

by gary_0 2y ago

This reminds me of back when e-mail clients would store your outgoing e-mails in the "outbox" waiting for the next time you dialed in. Nowadays networked software (and much of society) can't handle days of latency, only milliseconds, and I'm not sure that's a good thing.

rbanffy 2y ago
This will be one of the upsides of living on Mars.
canucker2016 2y ago
Not just for dialup network access. Microsoft Mail for PC Networks used two processes - one for the email client and one for sending/receiving email (aka the "email pump") . Since Windows 3.x used co-operative multitasking, only one process could run at a time, the email pump detected idle time and start sending/receiving email. Until that processing email time, the user could open the outbox and open outgoing emails, and modify and resend or cancel them. A few years pass and Exchange 4.0 is about to ship. But now the second process has been eliminated and emails are sent via RPC to the Exchange server. The user, though, has almost no chance to stop an email from being sent since the email spends almost no time in the outbox before the Exchange server sees and processes the outgoing email. People actually grumbled about Exchange being too fast. I took a look through the list of email message properties supported in Extended MAPI. One of them was a "time delay before sending" scalar, measured in seconds. The Exchange email client (as seen in Win95, also supported on Win3.x and NT) supported extension DLLs. I created an extension DLL that let the user specify a time delay for outgoing emails, and listened for an "email send" notification and then set the user-specified "time delay before sending" property on the outgoing email. Now outgoing emails would sit in the outbox for the user-specified amount of time before the Exchange server would process them. Problem solved. AFAIK the extension DLL was the only code that had set the "time delay before sending" property on emails. It worked the first time I ran the code. Someone did the appropriate testing. Eventually Outlook 97 shipped. The extension still worked. But a later Outlook update broke the extension DLL. Finally Outlook added support for the "time delay before sending" property for outgoing emails - no need for an extension DLL anymore.

by gary_0 2y ago

rbanffy 2y ago

This will be one of the upsides of living on Mars.

canucker2016 2y ago

Not just for dialup network access. Microsoft Mail for PC Networks used two processes - one for the email client and one for sending/receiving email (aka the "email pump") . Since Windows 3.x used co-operative multitasking, only one process could run at a time, the email pump detected idle time and start sending/receiving email. Until that processing email time, the user could open the outbox and open outgoing emails, and modify and resend or cancel them. A few years pass and Exchange 4.0 is about to ship. But now the second process has been eliminated and emails are sent via RPC to the Exchange server. The user, though, has almost no chance to stop an email from being sent since the email spends almost no time in the outbox before the Exchange server sees and processes the outgoing email. People actually grumbled about Exchange being too fast. I took a look through the list of email message properties supported in Extended MAPI. One of them was a "time delay before sending" scalar, measured in seconds. The Exchange email client (as seen in Win95, also supported on Win3.x and NT) supported extension DLLs. I created an extension DLL that let the user specify a time delay for outgoing emails, and listened for an "email send" notification and then set the user-specified "time delay before sending" property on the outgoing email. Now outgoing emails would sit in the outbox for the user-specified amount of time before the Exchange server would process them. Problem solved. AFAIK the extension DLL was the only code that had set the "time delay before sending" property on emails. It worked the first time I ran the code. Someone did the appropriate testing. Eventually Outlook 97 shipped. The extension still worked. But a later Outlook update broke the extension DLL. Finally Outlook added support for the "time delay before sending" property for outgoing emails - no need for an extension DLL anymore.