3 ms·
The email protocol is built for reliable delivery instead of speed. It's not built for realtime communication. It was built so that mail goes through even if th
by Wilya 13y ago
The email protocol is built for reliable delivery instead of speed. It's not built for realtime communication. It was built so that mail goes through even if the destination's mail server goes down for a day or two. The fact that mail arrives mostly in real time today is purely accidental. There's no guarantee in the protocols to ensure that.
- saraid216 13y agoOTOH, I've learned to treat IMs as emails to a degree: often I'll send a message to someone who's online and expect that they'll likely see it. This might be a quirk of the clients we use, but it's very email-like. The difference is less one of speed and more one of an ephemeral inbox. (In how it's treated by typical use cases; obviously, IM logging makes it less ephemeral.)