HACKER Q&A
📣 9dev

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


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?


  👤 bruce511 Accepted Answer ✓
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...


👤 noprocrasted
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.


👤 jeffreygoesto
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/


👤 pierreia
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.

👤 gaws
> 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?


👤 paulcole
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.

👤 atmosx
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...


👤 qup
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


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

👤 solardev
You can do a scheduled send in Gmail