http://ayende.comAyende @ RahienCopyright (C) Ayende Rahien 2004 - 2021 (c) 202660I also had mail delivered with large time spans around last weekend so I guess gmail had lots of spam mail to process last weekend :) http://ayende.com/3428/email-is-unreliable-asynchronous-communication-channel#comment3http://ayende.com/3428/email-is-unreliable-asynchronous-communication-channel#comment3Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:13:21 GMTPublishing 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 :-) http://ayende.com/3428/email-is-unreliable-asynchronous-communication-channel#comment2http://ayende.com/3428/email-is-unreliable-asynchronous-communication-channel#comment2Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:45:40 GMTYes, 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/ http://ayende.com/3428/email-is-unreliable-asynchronous-communication-channel#comment1http://ayende.com/3428/email-is-unreliable-asynchronous-communication-channel#comment1Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:39:35 GMT