If you, or anyone you are dealing with, is using AOL, forget it!!
AOL is the Ameritrade of the internet. That is why they developed "instant messenger". For any normal ISP, e-mail is instant messaging!! For any normal internet situation, e-mail is almost always (at least 99.999% of the time) received in less than 1 minute...and this is terrible. In any decent system, e-mail should take no more than 5 seconds. I can send myself an e-mail from my regular internet provider to my university, or IBM account, and the message is in my in-box before I can get to it!! (My university account is forwarded to my regular account, too, so it is actually getting sent and received twice in the process.
I have seen AOL emails take HOURS!! In fact, I can remember a few cases where a message was sent in the morning, and I did not receive it until the NEXT AFTERNOON!!
You do, in most cases, need to make sure that your e-mail program is set to check for mail frequently. I use Eudora, and I set it to check for mail every 5 or 6 minutes; thus, any message that is sent to me, I know about it within 6 minutes. But, if someone sends me a message at 00:00:00, and my e-mail program does not check until 00:06:00, then I don't "get" the message until then. But, if I manually check at 00:00:10, it will almost always be there...unless AOL is in the picture somewhere.
I have also had trouble sending messages to people with "msn" addresses, but I don't know about how long it took their messages to get to me. The bottom line is: e-mail is no different from any other internet packet data. It is just like a web page that you are calling up. If it takes you more than a couple of seconds to call up a web page, then something is seriously long. (Of course, if it is a graphics-rich web page it may take you a while to download it, but it should at least start downloading almost immediately.) I don't know for a fact, but from what I have seen, it appears that AOL (and possibly others) store e-mails in some sort of queue, and send them out on some undecipherable pattern. That is fine if you are trying to encrypt e-mail, and hide the origin, (and this is done by the normal encrypted email services), but it is not acceptable in normal, unencrypted e-mail.
FWIW,
Ed |
