Ask HN: To get married, I need to send an email the shortest time possible. How? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: To get married, I need to send an email the shortest time possible. How?

10 points9dev23 comments

Hey HN, happy holidays!

I just proposed to my now-fiancée (and she said yes!). We'd like to get married at this location that is very special to us, but they have rigid restrictions in place to ensure the few available slots are distributed as equally as possible: There is only a single appointment per month that interested couples can apply for exactly half a year in advance, by sending an email, exactly at 00:00:00 AM, with a PDF attachment that contains a scan of a formal request with signatures on it. The earliest submission in the inbox wins out!

How can I optimize for the shortest delivery time possible?

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1 appointment per month? Yikes.

As someone who has been married for over 30 years, let me offer some unsolicited advice.

I know the wedding seems terribly important now, but you'll discover what everyone discovers - 2 weeks later, a year later, whenever, it suddenly seems so irrelevant.

Marriage is a milestone, yes. But it disappears in the rear view mirror very quickly. The material parts of it vanish even faster.

The important part is you, your spouse, and the people you gave with you. No amount of money, no location, no live band, will make your marriage any better. That will take daily work, communication and a willingness to face challenges together.

So, how for it. Write a script, maybe you'll get a slot. But I urge you to hold this desire lightly. There are waaay harder and more important things to come.

I say all this knowing full well you'll ignore me. I can tell you what everyone knows, but experience doesn't work like that. That's OK.

On the other hand, ask around, and see how many married folk you know still care about their wedding...

Yeah, I spent $35 on my wedding and am coming up on my 22nd anniversary in a few months.

both our rings cost $80...30 years next year :-)

Yup.

As my wife puts it: do you want a wedding or a marriage?

Lookup what's the email host of the destination address. Get a local account on it. If the provider supports scheduled sending, use that, otherwise use Telnet or automate the HTTP request to the webmail.

Being on the same provider will remove a lot of the variable delays in internet delivery. Scheduled send could also mean your email actually arrives in the destination inbox ahead of time but is just hidden until the required time (as it may all be one database under the hood).

If you can get 2 accounts on said provider, you can also test various strategies against your own accounts.

My reconnaissance has shown the server is in fact a self-hosted ESMTPD on a static IP address owned by Vodafone, but using a script to submit directly is a good idea!

If you want to beat other romantically inclined geeks running scripts, you could make sure your script is running somewhere with low latency to that static IP. Use traceroute, looking glass, tools to ping from multiple regions to find the perfect place to run your script.

A VPS in the same region with good peering would be a start. Could see what else is running on IP addresses in the same range, maybe find someone who runs infra on a nearby IP who is willing to run your script.

Connect via Telnet to the mail server. Type everything except the final dot before midnight. Type the final dot and enter at exactly midnight.

https://www.comparitech.com/net-admin/telnet-smtp-test/

Or write a script to do so. Don't forget to test it first.

I wonder: do mail servers determine the received timestamp based on when the connection was opened or when the last character was received? I guess OP could send them an unrelated question using this technique, and check in the reply what timestamp they have.

Take an Airbnb close to the location so the email will travel through the shortest path :) More seriously, I'm not sure if even using a bot would be faster than just planning an automatic sending at 00:00 directly in your mailbox.

> There is only a single appointment per month that interested couples can apply for exactly half a year in advance, by sending an email, exactly at 00:00:00 AM, with a PDF attachment that contains a scan of a formal request with signatures on it.

What terrible organization is this?

I think I’d do this via a Google Apps Scripts trigger and have the script run every minute and if the minute is 59 or 00 then send the email.

Well, with fastmail at least (happy customer here), you can schedule an email[^1].

[^1]: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/send-later-with-scheduled-send...

Are you allowed to send two emails? One from her?

Can you recon their datetime ahead of time? If you're one second early, you're DQed right? What if their clock has drifted?

Edit: summoning @tomcam -- he might be your guy

Nope, just one. It has to have a sent timestamp >= 00:00:00, even though I’m pretty sure this is a bunch of administrative clerks rather than sophisticated sysadmins with a stopwatch inspecting email headers.

Call them, offer them double, and I’m sure they will accommodate you.

No, they really care strongly about the equality thing, so that wouldn’t work :) it’s a municipal offering, so they aren’t really open to bribes

> No, they really care strongly about the equality thing

They really don’t. The restriction heavily benefits programmers and/or very technical people who know how to game it.

Which is why there's no slapstick quite like idiots trying to fight for equality and equity.

> it’s a municipal offering, so they aren’t really open to bribes

It's (not) funny how in my country this means exactly that they are open to bribes.

You can do a scheduled send in Gmail

They don’t deliver exactly at the target time but rather +/- a few minutes, so that won’t work here…

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