Fun read! Along the way I was trying to guess the cause and my best guess was TTL-related. However I don’t quite understand the actual cause! If the connection

Fun read! Along the way I was trying to guess the cause and my best guess was TTL-related. However I don’t quite understand the actual cause! If the connection timeout is 3ms in practice, shouldn’t that be for a packet round-trip? So ~250 miles? And wouldn’t we expect at least a small delay on the remote SMTP server to process the packet?