Slashdot Mirror
Email Turns 34
34019 writes "The original Gmail engineer, Paul Buchheit, reminisces on the creation of email, and how he designed Gmail in hopes of it improving the way we communicate. From the article: 'Of course that wasn't the only reason why I wanted to build Gmail. I rely on email, a lot, but it just wasn't working for me. My email was a mess. Important messages were hopelessly buried, and conversations were a jumble; sometimes four different people would all reply to the same message with the same answer because they didn't notice the earlier replies. I couldn't always get to my email because it was stuck on one computer, and web interfaces were unbearably clunky. And I had spam. A lot of it. With Gmail I got the opportunity to change email - to build something that would work for me, not against me.'
We were plotting against Paul. We were trying to destroy his life, bit by bit.
-- Paul's former email
...Socrates is to Bette Midler.
E-mail is throwing a birthday party! It's next week, the same day as Spam.
Unfortunately, they agreed that Spam should send the invites. Expect them in your mailbox soon along with the free drugs and Nigerian relatives.
wow... i wish i was on the AOL 34 years ago. I bet I could download the whole AOL over my modem in just one minute!
Anybody know when the term Snail Mail was first published?
I have a postmarked envelope from the early 90's mentioning Snail Mail on the front.
Anybody else?
Acording to wikipedia, network email existed prior to 1971.
The main contribution that happened in 1971 was the introduction of the "@" symbol and the use of email on ARPANET. But prior to 1971 there was email being sent between computers.
From wikipedia:
"The early history of network e-mail is also murky; the AUTODIN system may have been the first allowing electronic text messages to be transferred between users on different computers in 1966, but it is possible the SAGE system had something similar some time before."
I don't wish to take away any from what Ray Tomlison acheived in 1971 which was a great contribution to introduce email to ARPA net and make it really convenient.
The original Gmail engineer, Paul Buchheit, reminisces on the creation of email, and how he designed Gmail in hopes of it improving the way we communicate.
Sorry, but I don't buy the google altruistic angle - they did this so they could better serve us ads. This is all about information, and who controls it. I doubt highly that it had anything at all to do with improving anyone's way of life. Google is a corporation, it's primary motive is, and always will be, profit.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I think Google's innovations are great, but the Everything's Beta syndrome, in email, in Usenet news archiving, etcetera... It's all wearing a little thin.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
How much in that article summary is a Gmail ad, and how much is about the history of e-mail?
Hmm, better go RTFA...
Hmm, now wait a minute! It's on Google's blog.
And it still just talks about Gmail.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
How is IRC "officially dead"? I still use it and the servers are usually quite busy. IM and IRC are totally different. I use IM for talking to people I already know, but I use IRC to talk new random people. IRC isn't dead it's function has just changed.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
I appreciate all he's done for Gmail, but he can't take credit for their excellent spam filtering. That credit should go to Steve Linford and XBL from the Spamhaus project. As stated before, Gmail uses XBL to filter out spam. Needless to say - the XBL is pretty cool.
So, does anyone still have a working email address from 1971? If not, I wonder who has the world's oldest currently working email address?
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
MS Outlook is the bane of my email existence. Its inability to group conversation threads encourages replies to include the conversation in its entirety. Its insistence that the reply precede the original drives me batty. I have not used GMail, but that "conversations" thingy looks moderately interesting, if it can display more than a single line of previous messages... Why not an email interface more like IM for conversations? Cut out the redundant headers and signatures. Oh wait, MS Outlook doesn't do the standard "-- \n" signature prefix. Lack of PGP/MIME support just kills me.
Can't remember where I saw this:
Also, I'd like a clearer picture of who sent it, who got it (the Cc: list), and when they sent it. I find this very difficult in MS Outlook which I use at work for various reasons mostly outside my control.
On a slightly different note, there is little I hate more than receiving an email that's been forwarded 700 times and having to scroll through a million >>>>> > >> just to see the message (using mutt for these forwards; perhaps MS Outlook doesn't display all that preceding crud, I don't know).
In conclusion, Outlook has done more to make email a painful experience than Sat^H^H^HAlan Ralsky himself.
Maybe google is waiting for gmail to turn 34 in order to promote it to a finale release and left the beta in the past.....
Your calendar needs spellcheck.
E-mail's fine and dandy. However, thanks to spam (or, more specifically, the self-righteous, over-zealous spam blocking lists and filters that have been set up because of the spam) e-mail is not a viable option for delivering critical messages anymore. I still use fax and phone to deliver those.
The owls are not what they seem
Maybe he could celebrate by unscrewing Gmail's MIME handling. That would
y pe: text/html; charset=us-ascii
n t-Type: image/jpeg; name="file.jpg"
c
improve the way we communicate. Gmail does not appear to handle recursive
mime, such as a multipart/related inside a multipart/alternative. Yahoo,
Hotmail, Thunderbird, Microsoft all seem to manage it ~ Why can't Gmail?
Example:
From: someone@domain
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="[BOUNDRY]"
This is a multi-part message in MIME format with text and recursed Mime alternative.
--[BOUNDRY]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; name="message.txt";
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
This is the text message. Gmail does not even show this.
--[BOUNDRY]
Content-Type: multipart/related; boundary="[BOUNDRY2]";
--[BOUNDRY2]
Content-T
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline;
<HTML>This is the HTML message with pictures. <IMG SRC="cid:whatever"></HTML>
--[BOUNDRY2]
Conte
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-ID: <whatever>
Content-Disposition: inline;
/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQEASABIAAD/4QAWRXhpet
--[BOUNDRY2]
--[BOUNDRY]
Google is good, good! See, they have the same three first letters! Goo!
And you're on Slashdot! How dare you disrespect the great Google! Take that talk to Redmond, mister. It's not welcome here!
(Yes, I'm kidding. No, seriously. I'm kidding. As in not flamebait).
Oh, and I've been on the net since 1990 and even back then I couldn't understand why people didn't top post.
The owls are not what they seem
Well, not e-mails but there is a list of 100 oldest .com domains.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
"From the article: 'Of course that wasn't the only reason why I wanted to build Gmail."
;) .
People tend to react badly if you come out and say, "strive toward complete world domination by the Google Corporation"
Advice for my fellow geeks: before seeking out that threesome you dream of, you might see what a TWOsome is like first.
Why does any message with the same subject get marked as part of the same conversation ? This is not always desired, and can cause a lot of confusion. This behavior should be configurable.
I know the gmail has a "delete-nothing" philosophy, but can we still have a keyboard shortcut to move messages to trash ?
I know google is all about searching
Don't get me wrong. I love gmail. It's right up there with pine and mutt as far as usability is concerned - and thanks to firefox/mozilla, I can use it seamlessly across platforms. I have learn't to live with it's quirks.
But my point is gmail is still lacking in the area of customization. It's like we all share Paul's gmail.conf file. Just because it works for Paul, doesn't mean it works for everyone else.
34 is a round number in base-34 notation. That's why it's so important to observe this anniversary, in case any non-geeks who happened to be misdirected to this page for some strange reason were wondering.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Integration of calender and email is extremely usefull. Having a PDA and being able to sync to it makes it even more usefull. gmail does neither and somewhat stands in the way of the later.
I remember in 1974 using IBM's TSO and clists to write messages and print them at distant locations at a large mfg. plant with over 6 million sq. feet under roof and 16,000 employees. Sort of email in - telegraph out, but better than nothing when you could not reach someone by phone, did not have the time to cross a 1700 acre site, needed to give precise information, or wanted a record of what was sent.
It was a few years later that true email showed up at that company, CCmail on early Macs and something else (? DSmail ?) on the mainframe terminals.
Apple's # 64, in 1987.
Microsoft as usual played catch up in 1991, according to WHOIS records...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Love it or hate it Gmail was a breakthrough for email by generating a renewed interest in improving web based email. Webmail had been basically the same since what, 1996?, then Gmail comes along and turns it on its head. Everyone is a winner as a result. Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google are now all competing and innovating in an area of the web that had been stangnant for years.
It's electronic. It's words. It counts.
Heck you could even argue it's digital.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Time to hang my head in shame!! Gmail works fine.
I made a coding error, missing off the trailing "--"s from the closing boundries. ie: The closing boundries should be:
--[BOUNDRY2]--
--[BOUNDRY]--
It is just that the others mail clients are more forgiving of fools and led me into a false sense that my code was OK. Very sorry to have posted. Andy.
purely out of boredom I went through the top 10 and with a little help from the wayback machine (which doesn't go far enough back!) here's my results.
.com land innit. 6 out of the top 10 have basically vanished and been replaced. hey hoe.
SYMBOLICS.COM - dead, well... it's there but is not much more a place holder
BBN.COM - blimey! it works!
THINK.COM - 1/2 dead. links to the oracle "think" project but the original site would've been Thinking Machines Corp Lisp Boxen... miss you guys!
MCC.COM - dead, 100% dead.
DEC.COM - links to HP - effectively dead REALLY miss you guys!
NORTHROP.COM - dead (merged with grumman)
XEROX.COM - still going strong.
SRI.COM - seems to still be going & the same org
HP.COM - now part of the hp/compaq/dec mega corp
BELLCORE.COM - dead, redirects to telcordia
Well, 20 years is a long old time in
The early bird may catch the first worm but he'll still be hungry by dinner time. or something...
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Oddly enough, the average penis size increased by three inches that year too.