Re: SMTP slow???

["Paul E. Hoffman" <phoffman@xxxxxxx>]

Hmmm. I had hoped that people who were used to saying "Internet mail is
slow" had either started doing their own measurements or had stopped
repeating myths.

For the record: the SMTP protocol is essentially as fast as any other
protocol for sucessful point-to-point transmission. In the real world, it
is quite common to send a message via SMTP from one end of the US to the
other and have it arrive in under 1 second.

It is also quite common for it to take much longer, if the SMTP queue on
either end of the transmission is backed up. This has nothing to do with
the protocol: it has to do with poor resource allocation at particular
sites. FTP can suffer the same problems, as anyone who has tried to
download something from ftp7.netscape.com in the last two days knows.

Bad SMTP implementations, or good SMTP implementations with bad
administration, have caused the perception that SMTP is slow. There are
tens of millions of people who are on systems with sub-1 second SMTP
transmission times that can attest to the fact that it isn't the protocol
that is the problem.

--Paul E. Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium