History of email

Last updated

The history of email entails an evolving set of technologies and standards that culminated in the email systems in use today. [1]

Contents

Computer-based messaging between users of the same system became possible following the advent of time-sharing in the early 1960s, with a notable implementation by MIT's CTSS project in 1965. Informal methods of using shared files to pass messages were soon expanded into the first mail systems. Most developers of early mainframes and minicomputers developed similar, but generally incompatible, mail applications. Over time, a complex web of gateways and routing systems linked many of them. Some systems also supported a form of instant messaging, where sender and receiver needed to be online simultaneously.

In 1971 Ray Tomlinson sent the first mail message between two computers on the ARPANET, introducing the now-familiar address syntax with the '@' symbol designating the user's system address. [2] [3] [4] [5] Over a series of RFCs, conventions were refined for sending mail messages over the File Transfer Protocol. Several other email networks developed in the 1970s and expanded subsequently.

Proprietary electronic mail systems began to emerge in the 1970s and early 1980s. IBM developed a primitive in-house solution for office automation over the period 1970–1972, and replaced it with OFS (Office System), providing mail transfer between individuals, in 1974. This system developed into IBM Profs, which was available on request to customers before being released commercially in 1981. CompuServe began offering electronic mail designed for intraoffice memos in 1978. The development team for the Xerox Star began using electronic mail in the late 1970s. Development work on DEC's ALL-IN-1 system began in 1977 and was released in 1982. Hewlett-Packard launched HPMAIL (later HP DeskManager) in 1982, which became the world's largest selling email system.

The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) protocol was implemented on the ARPANET in 1983. LAN email systems emerged in the mid-1980s. For a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed likely that either a proprietary commercial system or the X.400 email system, part of the Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile (GOSIP), would predominate. However, a combination of factors made the current Internet suite of SMTP, POP3 and IMAP email protocols the standard (see Protocol Wars).

During the 1980s and 1990s, use of email became common in business, government, universities, and defense/military industries. Starting with the advent of webmail (the web-era form of email) and email clients in the mid-1990s, use of email began to extend to the rest of the public. By the 2000s, email had gained ubiquitous status. The popularity of smartphones since the 2010s has enabled instant access to emails.

Precursors

The first electrical transmission of messages began in the 19th century in the form of the electrical telegraph, which started to replace earlier forms of telegraphy from the 1840s in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Telex became an operational teleprinter service in 1933, beginning in Germany and Europe, and after 1945 spread around the world. [6]

The AUTODIN military network in the United States, first operational in 1962, provided a message service between 1,350 terminals, handling 30 million messages per month, with an average message length of approximately 3,000 characters. [7] By 1968, AUTODIN linked more than 300 sites in several countries.

Terminology and usage

The term mail in the context of messages between computer users has been in use since the 1960s. In RFCs relating to the ARPANET, network mail was used since 1973. [8] [9]

Historically, the term electronic mail is any electronic document transmission. For example, several writers in the early 1970s used the term to refer to fax document transmission. [10] [11] The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has a first quotation for electronic mail in the modern context in 1975. [12] Electronic mail was widely discussed in the late 1970s, but was usually shortened simply to mail. [13] In September 1976, a Business Week article entitled When interoffice mail goes electronic remarked "In a sense, electronic mail is not new". [14]

The OED provides a June 1979 first usage for E-mail: "Postal Service pushes ahead with E-mail" in the journal Electronics . [12] No earlier usage has been found; although, the first usage of the term email may be lost. [15] CompuServe rebranded its electronic mail service as EMAIL in April 1981, which popularized the term. [13] [14] The term computer mail was also used in the early 1980s. [16] [17]

The June 1979 usage of E-mail referred to the United States Postal Service (USPS) project called Electronic Computer Originated Mail, which they abbreviated E-COM. USPS began looking into electronic mail in 1977 resulting in the E-COM proposal in September 1978. The service launched in 1982, allowing corporate customers to send electronic mail to a post office branch from where it was printed and delivered in the normal way. It operated until 1985. [18] [19] [20]

Host-based mail systems

With the introduction of MIT's Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) in 1961, [21] for the first time multiple users could log into a central system [nb 1] from remote terminals, and store and share files on the central disk. [22] Informal methods of using such shared files to pass messages were soon developed and expanded into the first mail systems.

Email networks

The first electronic message was sent between these two adjacent PDP-10 computers at BBN Technologies in 1971, connected only through the ARPANET. Timesharing and Development KA-10s at BBN, circa 1970.jpg
The first electronic message was sent between these two adjacent PDP-10 computers at BBN Technologies in 1971, connected only through the ARPANET.

To facilitate electronic mail exchange between remote sites and with other organizations, telecommunication links, such as dialup modems or leased lines, provided means to transport email globally, creating local and global networks. This was challenging for a number of reasons, including the widely different email address formats in use.

Attempts at interoperability

Early interoperability among independent systems included:

LAN email systems

In May 1979, Xerox ran a television advertisement for its 1973 Xerox Alto system, demonstrating the 1978 Distributed Message System (DMS) client, known as Laurel, to the US public. [71] [72] [73] An application Xerox described as replacing Xerox's earlier MSG client for its MAXC document distribution system. [72] In 1981, the Xerox Star went on sale, offering a commercial variant of the Xerox Alto's multi-user virtual office, including computer mail. [17] [74] The Star had been in development since 1977 and the development team relied heavily on the technologies they were working on, including electronic mail. [75] [76] [77]

In the early 1980s, networked personal computers on LANs became increasingly important. Server-based systems similar to the earlier mainframe systems were developed. Examples include:

Eventually these systems could link different organizations as long as each organization ran the same email system and proprietary protocol. Various vendors supplied gateway software to link these incompatible systems.

ARPANET mail

Experimental message transfers between separate computer systems began on the ARPANET. [24] Ray Tomlinson, of BBN, sent the first message across the network in 1971, initiating the use of the "@" sign to separate the names of the user and the user's machine. [78] He sent a message from one Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 computer to another PDP-10. The two machines were placed next to each other. [28] [79] Tomlinson's work was adopted across the ARPANET, which significantly increased network traffic. [80] Tomlinson has been called "the inventor of modern email". [81] [1]

A "Mail Protocol" was proposed in RFC   196 in July 1971, and a more comprehensive approach in RFC   524 in June 1973, but these were not implemented. [82] [83]

From SNDMSG to MSG

In early 1971, Ray Tomlinson updated an existing utility called SNDMSG so that it could copy messages (as files) over the network. [84] In July 1972, Abhay Bhusan, a professor at MIT, was writing the final specs of the ARPANET file-transfer protocol. Upon the suggestion of his colleagues, he added Tomlinson's email programs to the final product. [85] Tomlinson's program was an immediate hit. An ARPA study in 1973, a year after network email was introduced to the ARPANET community, found that three-quarters of the traffic over the ARPANET consisted of email messages. [86] [87] [85]

Lawrence Roberts, the project manager for the ARPANET development, took the idea of READMAIL, which dumped all "recent" messages onto the user's terminal, and wrote a program for TENEX in TECO macros called RD, which permitted access to individual messages. [88] Barry Wessler then updated RD and called it NRD. [89]

Marty Yonke rewrote NRD to include reading, access to SNDMSG for sending, and a help system, and called the utility WRD, which was later known as BANANARD. John Vittal then updated this version to include three important commands: Move (combined save/delete command), Answer (determined to whom a reply should be sent) and Forward (sent a message to a person who was not already a recipient). The system was called MSG. With inclusion of these features, MSG is considered to be the first integrated modern electronic mail program, from which many other applications have descended. [88]

FTP mail

ARPANET defined conventions from 1973 for dissimilar computers to exchange mail using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) over a homogeneous network. Two FTP commands, MAIL and MLFL, permitted an FTP user process to deliver a file or string of text to an FTP server process, designating it as mail to be made available to a user, identified by a local name, in its host.

The use of the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) for "network mail" was proposed in RFC   469 in March 1973. [90] Through RFC   561, RFC   680, RFC   724, and finally RFC   733 in November 1977, a standardized framework was developed for "electronic mail" using FTP mail servers on the ARPANET. [16] [91]

Delivermail was introduced in 1979 as a mail transport agent, i.e. email server. It used the FTP protocol to transmit electronic mail messages to the recipient. [92]

Initially, addresses were of the form, username@hostname.

Internet email

Ray Tomlinson discussed network mail among the International Network Working Group in INWG Protocol note 2, written in September 1974. [93] INWG discussed protocols for electronic mail in 1979, [94] which was referenced by Jon Postel in his early work on Internet email. Postel first proposed an Internet Message Protocol in 1979 as part of the Internet Experiment Note (IEN) series. [95] [96] [97]

SMTP

In September 1980, Postel and Suzanne Sluizer published RFC   772 which proposed the Mail Transfer Protocol to enable servers to transmit "computer mail" on the ARPANET as a replacement for FTP. RFC   780 of May 1981 removed all references to FTP. In November 1981, Postel published RFC   788 describing the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) protocol, which was updated by RFC   821 in August 1982. Addresses were extended to username@host.domain by RFC   805 in February 1982. RFC   822, written by Dave Crocker, defined the format for messages.

ARPANET switched to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983 and the Internet grew rapidly thereafter (see Protocol Wars). A new mail transfer agent based on SMTP, Sendmail, was introduced in 1983. SMTP use continued to grow on the Internet.

After the introduction of the Domain Name System (DNS) in 1985, mail routing was updated in January 1986 by RFC   974.

As the influence of the ARPANET spread across academic communities, gateways were developed to pass mail to and from other networks such as CSNET, JANET, BITNET, X.400, and FidoNet. This often involved addresses such as:

hubhost!middlehost!edgehost!user@uucpgateway.somedomain.example.com

which routes mail to a user with a "bang path" address at a UUCP host. [98]

POP and IMAP

The Internet community developed two further standards, the Post Office Protocol (POP) and the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), in 1984 and 1988 respectively. POP and IMAP enabled connections with remote e-mail servers that contain users’ mailboxes.

Email clients

During the 1980s and 1990s, use of email became common in business, government, universities, and defense/military industries. Starting with the advent of webmail (the web-era form of email) and email clients in the mid-1990s, use of email began to extend to the rest of the public. By the 2000s, email had gained ubiquitous status. The popularity of smartphones since the 2010s has enabled instant access to emails.

Mail servers

Many providers of mail server software emerged in the 1980s with various features.

Notable first uses of email

See also

Notes

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