On the Chaotic Evolution of Email? 52
TheCarlMau asks: "I'm doing research on the origins of email in the 70's and 80's. I'm particularly interested in how this technology was designed and implemented without any planned trajectory (ie: nobody sat down in 1970 and planned to create email as we know it today in 2006). As very little has been written on the history, I'm wondering if the Slashdot community could provide any insights, stories, or first-hand experiences? It seems to me, as a person who did not experience this 'revolution,' that the offspring of the ARPANET technology was hackish and sometimes chaotic. What do you think on this matter?"
The history of any internet protocol (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The history of any internet protocol (Score:5, Insightful)
To really get to that you need to talk to the people who were there (or find the artifacts of them talking to each other: letters, papers, etc.). Luckily, the 70's are recent enough that many are probably still alive, and there comes a point where usenet was an active archive. I'm sure many of those people maintain active email addresses today.
I'm not sure what depth of research the submitter was intending, but RFCs and Usenet do provide very good jumping points on the topic.
Anm
Re:The history of any internet protocol (Score:4, Informative)
Of special interest might be RFC 706, [faqs.org] "On the Junk Mail Problem." They saw it coming...
Re:The history of any internet protocol (Score:1)
Haydn.
Internet is only half the story (Score:4, Informative)
When Internet mail started to catch on in the early 90s, the Internet Mail capabilties were rather obviously kludged into these systems, usually with a funky addressing scheme such as "joeblow@example.com @ INTERNET", difficulty with file attachments, etc. Microsoft even introduced a X400 based product in 1994 where it was clear that SMTP was an after-thought. It was only around 2000 when SMTP was integrated into Exchange and Notes as a core protocol, rather than a gateway.
Many of the features that people from the Internet Mail tradition find distasteful, such as Top-Reply and Rich (html) Text come directly from the capabilities of corporate systems. Any sort of comprehensive history of email has to include these systems, rather than just the Unix boxes with their sendmail.
Finally, let me just complain that the RFCs for Internet Mail took a very simple spec and turned it into a complete fricken mess, with all sorts of ridiclous, overly-complex encoding crap for back-compatibility with 7-bit systems. It would be nice if someday someone flushed all this MIME crap and started over with a nice clean protocol like HTTP.
Re:Internet is only half the story (Score:1)
True, email didn't start with RFC 822. But surely, the products you mention are late 1980s and early 1990s things? The roots of elect
Re:Internet is only half the story (Score:1)
I'm not sure when desktop email became ubitiqutious, but about 10 years I worked at a place where some people flashed their old-timer cred by having a real 3270 tube on their desk for PROFS. (And if you were really cool, you had one with a light pen.) The rest of us just used MSMail.
A very small datum (Score:4, Interesting)
Then when I want to college (this wasn't much before every freshman was issued an email account and web space at orientation -- things snowballed really quickly) someone told me that there was a way to send messages by computers to other schools, for free. I went down to the bowels of the CS building and a moss-covered grad student gave me a Bitnet address that looked like the volume of the earth in cubic centimeters. In hindsight, the whole episode was like something out of Harry Potter.
Re:A very small datum (Score:3, Insightful)
You noticed this too ? I had that feeling too, though not of HP since he wasn't invented. Today, everyone take it for granted. But it's not. It's anything but. It's mindboggling is what.
That we consider it trivial that a single click of a mouse-button causes billions of transistors all over the world to change state, magnetic platters to spin, and photons to surge trough hair-thin fibers of glass, all in a split-second, giving you w
What I'm wondering is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:2)
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Neither will protect you from dictionary attacks. And now that spammers have armies of zombies at their beck and call, they're doing distributed dictionary attacks, which are harder to detect and block.
Common first names, first initials with common last names, role descriptions... Heck, we even get spam sent to template@(domain name) because it happened to be active at the time someone tried sending it mail.
Unless you make your
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:2)
Who has a e-mail name that appears in a DICTIONARY?!?!?!? The closest I've ever gotten is ted@oit.osshe.state.or.us.edu, and that was a long time ago.
And now that spammers have armies of zombies at their beck and call, they're doing distributed dictionary attacks, which are harder to detect and block.
Uh, don't have your e-mail name something that occurs in a dictionary?
Common first names, first initials with common last names, role descriptions... He
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:3, Informative)
I get my internet service from Comcast. I don't use my Comcast email account, but my girlfriend needed an account, so I created her one under mine (you get like 5 aliases). Her first name happens to be 4 letters long and rather uncommon, so I was able to get her first choice, xxxx@comcast.net.
I created the account at maybe 10:00am. She logged in, for the very first time, at around 11:00am. By that time, having never ever used the account, she already had about 10-20 spam
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:2)
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:1)
Me.
I run a theatre and my email address is theatre@myisp. (I also have theater@myisp because a lot of people can't spell theatre correctly.)
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:2)
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:2)
aaaa@example.com
aaab@example.com
aaac@example.com
zzzz@example.com
Or it might go like this:
aardvark@example.com
apple@example.com
bacon@example.com
Or maybe
alice@example.com
bob@example.com
carl@example.com
Or perhaps
webmas
Re: (Score:1)
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:1)
Well then, you're just a dumbass.
I'm sorry, I meant "inexperienced".
I am sure that most people who have managed email for a domain have seen dictionary attacks many, many times. How do you think e-mail ends up at a "sales@" email address when one never existed, and therefore wasn't published on the web or appeared in some kind of directory?
Seriously, your arguments are week; those who run thei
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:1)
The mail was on PrimOS i think, (Text/Memo?), and it meant that i frequently got strange emails where someone internally would start typing the subject line in the wrong field and if they had a "the" in it then i was copied on the mail!
t
Rejected (Score:4, Funny)
Ask Slashdot: On the Catholic Intelligent Design of Email?
Catholics dont believe in Creationism (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Rejected (Score:2)
Re:Rejected (Score:1)
What evolution? (Score:5, Interesting)
Email was compelling from day one. The technology has changed, but only in details: bangpaths are gone and the abomination of HTML afflicts us. Popularity and exploits are results of the Metcalfe Effect.
But email is still very much email. `ytalk` has morphed into [G]AIM. WWW similarly unchanged although it has seen more technical changes, including a wholesale shift from gopher:
Where Wizards Stay Up Late (Score:4, Informative)
Provides a good background to how the internet came about, including a chapter on email.
man uucp (Score:2)
Email before networks (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Email before networks (Score:3, Interesting)
Even if I created a document with a word processor, it was unlikely that the intended audience also had
Re:Email before networks (Score:1)
Bang paths (Score:5, Informative)
It seems to me, as a person who did not experience this 'revolution,' that the offspring of the ARPANET technology was hackish and sometimes chaotic. What do you think on this matter?"
I think you should count yourself lucky you missed it. Just a few of the many joys:
Great. Well, now I know what I'm going to be having nightmares about tonight.
--MarkusQ
Re:Bang paths (Score:2)
I don't think File/Group/Record Separators where really considered line ending conventions.
Re:Bang paths (Score:2)
Re:Bang paths (Score:2)
I don't think File/Group/Record Separators where really considered line ending conventions.
You wouldn't think so, would you? Somebody (and I don't recall who) used to pass along email with RS between lines, GS between the header and the body (and, if I recall correctly, US to delimit stuff in the header) and FS between messages.
And not everyone used eight bit ASCII. Or eve
Origins of Multimedia mail (Score:3, Informative)
Mark began working on a related project: MIME. This was done at U Washington, which developed MIME in conjunction with pine and pico. He spent a lot of time on the NeXT USENET lists posting vitriol about how much better MIME was going to be than NeXTmail. In retrospect the postings, and responses, give a lot of insight into how MIME was shaped, developed, and of course how it was influenced by NeXTmail.
More info (Score:1)
Here's [google.com] quite an illuminating link on google groups.
Re:Origins of Multimedia mail (Score:2)
Re:Origins of Multimedia mail (Score:2)
Mark began working on a related project: MIME. This was done at U Washington, which developed MIME in conjunction with pine and pico.
I guess that explains why old versions of Pine understand RTF but have no clue what to do with HTML.
Look @ this! (Score:4, Informative)
http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/home.html [bbn.com]
"I sent the first network email in 1971 using a program I wrote called SNDMSG. I have written a brief account of the first email with the intent of forestalling some of the more common questions about that event. If you want to see what the computer used to send the first email looked like, you will find that here too."
chaotic? (Score:2)
email + directory evolution (Score:1, Interesting)
ISO protocols and
Thanks! (Score:1)