In 1860, roughly 186 Pony Express stations were located roughly 10 miles (16 km) apart along the Pony Express route. At each station stop, the express rider would change to a fresh horse, taking only the mail pouch called a mochila (from the Spanish for pouch or backpack) with him.
The employers stressed the importance of the pouch. They often said that, if it came to be, the horse and rider should perish before the mochila did. The mochila was thrown over the saddle and held in place by the weight of the rider sitting on it. Each corner had a cantina or pocket. Bundles of mail were placed in these cantinas, which were padlocked for safety. The mochila could hold 20 pounds (9 kg) of mail along with the 20 pounds (9 kg) of material carried on the horse.
Eventually, everything except one revolver and a water sack was removed, allowing for a total of 165 pounds (75 kg) on the horse’s back. Riders, who could not weigh over 125 pounds (57 kg), changed about every 75–100 miles and rode day and night. In emergencies, a given rider might ride two stages back to back, over 20 hours on a quickly moving horse.
The E-mail probably gets through – Modern Delivery Methods
These days we pretty much take it as a given that an email that leaves our desktop will arrive in seconds in our intended recipient’s inbox. But does it? Recently I’ve been working with a client who had a sneaking suspicion that a number of important business emails had not been ‘getting through’ to the people who were meant to receive it. intrigued we did a little digging and found out the sneaking suspicion was fully justified. But why did some of his emails reach their final destinations and not others?
in business, there’s nothing worse than uncertainty so we pursued the matter further – our client was using his local ISP KAROO as the outgoing server – so the first thing to do was change the SMTP outgoing mail settings to see what effect that had – problem solved! as soon as the settings were changed to his domain email settings, he reported that the delivery issues were cleared up. So we swapped the settings back and the delivery issues came back. Clearly, the problem rested with the ISP and their outgoing mail servers. Calls to their help desk failed to get a resolution, but a check with Hetrix Tools showed that their outgoing mail server had been blacklisted,
A Blacklists service create lists of servers that are involved in spamming or other activity – companies can subscribe to these lists and screen their incoming email against the existing blacklist – thus preventing delivery into their own systems.
The solution adopted for this particular case was to obtain third-party outgoing email service that could allow, high volumes of mail, multiple users, and delivery accountability. SMTP2Go were the suppliers of choice and so far we’ve been able to record 100% delivery rates for the outgoing mail. A result that The Pony Express would be proud of – the mail gets through and no horses or riders are harmed during the process!