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Email is unreliable, asynchronous, communication channel
time to read 1 min | 107 words
Just a reminder to myself, for the last couple of days I am starting to see time lapsed threads in Gmail. Specifically, a reply will arrive my mail box much earlier than the originator message. Sometimes the difference is measured in days.
Considering that I am much more prone to use Email for IM discussions than IM clients, I find this highly amusing.
It is also a good reminder of what we can tolerate such an unreliable communication protocol for something so essential. I am currently building my Producing Production Quality Software presentation, and this bring to bear the fallacies of distributes computing one again.
Comments
Yes, it is asynchronous, but the use of an SMTP server to send the email is very much synchronous. If the server is down, or slow, or whatever, your thread will be blocked.
I know you know this Oren, but a lot of people fall into this trap.
You can see how to work around this problem in the code I posted here:
http://udidahan.weblogs.us/2008/06/06/web-scalability-slides-and-code/
Publishing to the end point is always synchronous.
As a simple example, trying to publish to ActiveMQ will fail if the ActiveMQ is not up.
MSMQ publishing is sync, the part where you register the message in the local queue :-)
I also had mail delivered with large time spans around last weekend so I guess gmail had lots of spam mail to process last weekend :)
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