Preface: A Short History of Email

Most of us use email every day, but we rarely think about how it all began or how its roots affect what the technology can do.

Email has become an indispensable part of daily business activities in nearly all aspects of business. The massive breadth of populations using email regularly can be attributed, in large part, to its accessibility and general usefulness.

The medium’s roots can be traced back to the very infancy of the internet, and beyond…  In fact, email as a concept predates the internet by a wide margin.

The earliest email was very similar to simply leaving a note on someone's desk. At first, an email was simply a message that was placed in another user's file directory, in an area where they would be able to see it when they logged in. The first email system of this kind was the one used at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965. The system was known as MAILBOX and was quite effective, but only if the people wishing to communicate with each other were regularly using the same computer.

During the early era of email, mainframe computers could have up to one hundred users that would access the mainframe from their desks, using what were called "dumb terminals". Dumb terminals just connected to the mainframe - they had no storage or memory of their own. All the work was actually done on the remote mainframe computer. Because of this, prior to the invention of the internet, email could only be used to send messages to someone on the same mainframe computer.

In 1969, the US Department of Defense implemented ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), a network connecting numerous computers across the department for the purpose of communication within the organisation. This concept of nearly instantaneous communication between machines within an organisation proved to be so beneficial and practical that the concept soon began to spread.

However, with the advent of internal networks the protocols for sending messages became more complex. When sending a message from one computer to another within a network, how would one indicate where the message was intended to go?

A man by the name of Ray Tomlinson had the answer and, as a result, is credited with inventing the modern email system that we know today. In 1972, while working as an ARPANET contractor, he chose to use the “@” symbol to denote the sending of messages from one computer to another computer. It now became as simple as addressing messages as “username@name of computer”, which is essentially how email has been addressed ever since.

Things developed rapidly from there with the invention of email folders and then software to organize email. By 1976 ARPANET traffic was 75% via electronic mail. It was proving so useful that ideas came up about how to send an electronic mail message to a user on a computer outside of an internal network.

This concept of communicating via email from organisation to organisation was the impetus for the advent of the internet itself. Here was something that ordinary people all over the world wanted to use and so email took us from ARPANET to the Internet.

The first important email standard was called simple message transfer protocol (SMTP) and it’s still in use today.

In the early 1980s, networked personal computers became increasingly important. Server-based systems, similar to the earlier mainframe systems were developed, such as WordPerfect Office, Microsoft Mail and Lotus Notes. Eventually these systems could link up via telecommunication links (such as dialup modems or leased lines) - these were the days of per-minute charges for email for individual dialup users. Remember dial up and all the connection noises it made?

These systems facilitated electronic mail exchange between remote sites and with other organizations, as long as each organization ran the same email system and proprietary protocol. This was challenging for a number of reasons, including the widely different email address formats in use.

As internet standards for email began to mature, it allowed users to develop mail systems that would work with each other. In the 1990s, a combination of factors made the current Internet suite of SMTP, POP3 and IMAP email protocols the standard and by 1993 the word “electronic mail” had been replaced by “email” in the public lexicon as internet use became more widespread.

With the internet (known as the World Wide Web in its early days), email started to be made available with friendly web interfaces by providers such as Yahoo and Hotmail. Now that email was affordable, everyone wanted at least one email address, and the medium was adopted by not just millions, but hundreds of millions of people.

By the turn of the millennium, having an email “address” had gone from being a luxury/curiosity to being a societal expectation akin to having a phone number. The age of email had begun in earnest.

Despite what the world wide web offers, email remains the most important application of the internet and the most widely used facility it has. Today, email is a primary means of communication for more than 600 million people around the world and is often seen as a new, modernised version of the postal service. Indeed, much of the computer terminology owes its existence to the old-fashioned pots or ‘snail mail’, reflected in words such as mailbox and delivery.

But the online world is completely different in scale to anything that existed in the past. With so many people using email for communication, numerous problems have developed . . .