The 500 mile email problem

I am a frequent visitor of the Joel Reddit. This reddit contains some interesting articles on just about anything related to computers. One such article which I found a few days back is pretty interesting.

The author is a person running the campus email system. He gets a call one day from a person in the statistics department who cribs that their emails are not delivered to locations farther than 500 miles. Stumped? Take a look at how he solves it.