On Wed, 26 Jun 2002, Phil Wright wrote:

> In my experience it's not wise to rely upon emails from the auctions
> system for advice about of higher bidders (there seemed to be
> delayed).  Towards the end of the auction, having more than one
> browser window open and refreshing every 15 to 30 seconds was a far
> more reliable way of find out about higher bids than the emails sent.

Email is not a time-critical medium; if a mail queue is set to flush
every (say) 30 mins, there's the potential to see something 29 mins 
after it was sent. 

And there's no requirement that a queue-flush be done every 30 mins
(though this number seems to be 'in vogue'). Larger sites (few 
hundred thousand mailboxes) might set this to 1 hour or longer.

So yes, the interactive medium is the one you need to use :)

Regards,

Saliya