If you define EOM as magic, or as a solution to the Two Generals problem, EOM is certainly impossible. If EOM means "the programmer doesn't have to think about

If you define EOM as magic, or as a solution to the Two Generals problem, EOM is certainly impossible. If EOM means "the programmer doesn't have to think about idempotency," EOM is what I want. Happy to call this "EOM asterisk" if you and/or the OP like. At any point in the conversation, you don't know whether your interlocutor has yet received the last message you sent. This is because you are talking over a network, rather than over a magic bus. However, you know that before the endpoint processes each message, it has processed each previous message once and exactly once. I think this is what the programmer wants -- asterisk or no. Network connectivity failure is best modeled as the limit case of network latency. Of course, when you send a message over a network in the real world, you can't know whether it has been received or not until you get an acknowledgment. (Edit: asterisks.)