On the Chaotic Evolution of Email?

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?"

Comments

The history of any internet protocol

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Can be found by reading the Requests for Comment associated with that protocol. In other words there WAS planning involved- a good deal of planning- it's just that the end-users were completely different than the original audience- the original audience were arpanet researchers, whose system was so good it overtook the competeing FIDONet hackers- which resulted in spammers.

Re:The history of any internet protocol

[Anm]

That's like saying the history of the web is summarized in the W3C spec for HTML. It hints at the history, and each revision signifies an era in its history, but by no means is it really informative on the influences, predecessors, politiics, and competing ideas.

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

[TechDock]

Check out RFC 1000 , from 1987. Stephen Crocker used the occasion of reaching 1000 to spell out the history of RFCs, and also the beginning planning stages of Arpanet. Has some interesting history included in it. He also uses it as an index to the first 1000 RFCs, including several dealing with the mail system.

Of special interest might be RFC 706, "On the Junk Mail Problem." They saw it coming...

A very small datum

[Otter]

The first person I saw claim that electronic mail was the wave of the future, and the first time I'd ever heard of it was, of all people -- William F. Buckley in his newspaper column. He was referring, if extremely vague memory serves, to MCI Mail, although this was probably before the arrival of such user-friendly super-high-tech as Kermit and Xmodem.

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

[Eivind]

In hindsight, the whole episode was like something out of Harry Potter.

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 whatever website you clicked the link to is *not* trivial at all. It only seems that way because the technology is so simple to use.

What I'm wondering is...

[PurifyYourMind]

...when are features like PGP, anti-phishing, anti-spam, working rich text/html, etc. going to become part of a standard that everyone can use easily? Right now there are a bunch of "hacks" that patch up problems with email, and as such there is a huge difference in what some people get versus what others are stuck with. Is this something like IPv6 that will simply have to be mandated and rolled out with the cooperation of lots of large organizations?

Re:What I'm wondering is...

[Kelson]

NEVER post your e-mail on a web page. 2. NEVER e-mail somebody you don't know.

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 email address really hard to guess....

Re:What I'm wondering is...

[blate]

The dictionary attackers are brutal.

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 messages.

Bloody amazing.

I think that, next time around, I'll try a much longer user name, as several people have already suggested.

Re:What I'm wondering is...

[feijai]

It's possible this was a dictionary attack. But Occam's razor suggests to me a more likely reason: Comcast had either stupidaly posted the email address in a public location automatically, or Comcast had handed the email address automatically to less savory types. I strongly suspect the former.

Rejected

[ArsonSmith]

Of course my article gets rejected

Ask Slashdot: On the Catholic Intelligent Design of Email?

What evolution?

[redelm]

From my 20+ year perspective, there's been remarkably little evolution in any Internet protocol. Mostly devolution to the masses :)

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

[Mendy]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/074346837 6/qid=1137543821/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl/202- 4708284-5091803

Provides a good background to how the internet came about, including a chapter on email.

Email before networks

[klossner]

There was email long before there were networks. http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html describes early email on Multics, between multiple users time-sharing one mainframe.

Re:Email before networks

[WGR]

There were many competing network email services in the 70s and early 80s, based on the timesharing networks for business available then. Each created its own protocol because they all were running private networks. I worked for one comapny and it tried to sell email for commercial use, but since most business was still paper based, FAX was more often seen as the solution for electronic communication.

Even if I created a document with a word processor, it was unlikely that the intended audience also had compatible word processors or even computers. T WIth the ubiquity of TCP/IP today, it is hard to remember that there was a time that most packet networks ran on technology based on the X.25 protocol and were very slow and expensive. Email was seen as only useful within a company and not between companies.

Email was the wave of the future for about 20 years from 1975 to 1995. It was used heaviliy in the research and academic world, but not too much by the corporate world between companies. It was only with the rise of the web, that email also became a commercial reality to exchange data between companies and individuals.

Bang paths

[MarkusQ]

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:

• Bang paths. Rather than the mail telling you where it was supposed to go, it gave you a guess of how to get it there. Easy in theory; it's just a concatenation of machines, and you play hot potato with it. In practice...yetch.
• How many line ending conventions do you suppose there were back in the day? Ever hear of the ASCII characters FS, GS, and RS?
• UUCP. It bore the same relationship to transport protocols that a bilge pump has to sound ship design. Basically, if you couldn't handle it on one machine, you pumped it over to another one (with shell commands to be executed on more or less blind faith by both parties), and sort of hoped that things would work out.

Great. Well, now I know what I'm going to be having nightmares about tonight.

--MarkusQ

Origins of Multimedia mail

[feijai]

You might do well to check postings by Mark Crispin in the comp.sys.next.* USENET archives, sometime around 1988-1992. NeXT developed an early version of mail with fonts, colors, rulers (margins/tabs/spacing/justification.etc.), embedded pictures (TIFF, PostScript), attached files in arbitrary locations in the text, a picture of the sender, and embedded sound clips. Basically the program created an RTF file with attachments, tar'd it up, uuencoded it, and sent it as a plaintext message. Worked perfectly -- if you had a NeXT computer to read it on! To my knowledge, no other system had email even remotely as sophisticated as this.

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.

Look @ this!

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS]

First, let me say, Google is your friend. But since I'm really nice, I'll ask Ray Tomlinson:

http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/home.html

"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."

Catholics dont believe in Creationism

[dave1g]

The Catholic Church officially recognizes evolution as a valid theory, they do not believe in 7 day creationism or any of that other ID bullshit.

Internet is only half the story

[IntlHarvester]

The issue with going right to the RFCs is that E-Mail was widely deployed before Internet access was. Corporations and government used inhouse systems such as IBM PROFS, Lotus ccMail, and even MS Mail. There were large non-RFC mail networks, including MCI, AT&T, and Worldcom's Lotus Notes network (that had something like a million users when the Internet was far smaller).

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.