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7. |
| You've been sent to this web page to further explain a question that
you called the help desk about. In this changing world, things that
we're used to doing and that make total sense to us, often come to a dead
end on the internet. This is happening because the different
Internet Service Providers (some of which are really big and have millions
of customers) are trying to reduce how much SPAM email is moving through
the system, and to try to stop what they perceive as a bad email from
ending up in your box.
Here's a short story on how traditional email works. Think of an old time fire brigade. Your email is one of the buckets. It's handed off from your local internet service provider (with a destination address on it) to the next logical "fireman" that it thinks can get it to it's destination. That fireman (known in computer terms as a ROUTER) hands it off to the next one and then to the next one until finally after maybe 20 or so handoffs it gets to the receiving persons Internet Service Provider, where it either waits in the last mailbox (water bucket) or because most folks now have always on DSL type connections, it actually ends up in their email program on their computer. As each fireman passes the bucket (router passes your email packet) they promptly forget what was sent and are ready to take the next hand off which they will try to send on to it's correct destination (they do this millions of times a second). There are many of these routes around the country and the world. On any given day, or moments apart, two emails sent from the same POINT A to the same POINT B could take completely different routes to get there. Different ones of these ROUTERS now operate on different rules depending on who owns them. Some won't pass anything bigger than a megabyte size some 2 megs, others don't care and are wide open. However this is the important thing to remember. The ISP on the sending side probably has NO connection/agreement with the ISP on the receiving side AND NEITHER OF THEM have a connection/agreement with the routers along the way. This is why sending a big email works at some moments and never arrives at others. This is a very simplistic overview of a very complicated process but the bottom line is calling and making demands on your ISP to FIX THE PROBLEM has no effect. I assure you your ISP really wants you to have a good internet experience but more and more things are out of their hands and this problem will continue to get worse as the years go by. If you have dialup, the process is even more complicated by the incredibly slow speed of your connection. SO WHAT'S THE SOLUTION?! DISCLAIMER |
Put HELP DESK QUESTION in the Subject Line