
The History of Email - zackbloom
https://eager.io/blog/history-of-email/
======
js2
If you're enjoying this series[1] as much as I am, let me highly recommend the
book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late - The Origins of The Internet"[2].

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=zackbloom](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=zackbloom)

2\. [http://katiehafner.com/books/where-wizards-stay-up-
late/](http://katiehafner.com/books/where-wizards-stay-up-late/)

~~~
pasbesoin
I enjoyed that book. I've been surprised it doesn't get mentioned more often.

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glandium
Obligatory link to "the case of the 500-mile email":

[http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html](http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html)

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simplexion
This is all wrong! If you search "Inventor of email" on Google you are shown
the one-true email god is VA Shiva Ayyadurai. Stop denying him the title of
inventor of email with all this propaganda.

Seriously though... I thought Google was going for accuracy in their search
results. It's amazing that this idiots website is listed at the top when
searching for this information.

~~~
ckastner
I'd argue that Google achieved maximum accuracy with that result. Most people
searching for the "Inventor of email" seem to be looking for that person,
because the story of his controversy seems to be way more popular than the
actual history of email.

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mikro2nd
Alleged "History of email" and no mention of bang-addresses? For years we were
all routing our emails via uunet with bang addresses before @ became a thing.

~~~
zackbloom
I actually left them out only because I had talked about them in the context
of URLs: [https://eager.io/blog/the-history-of-the-url-domain-and-
prot...](https://eager.io/blog/the-history-of-the-url-domain-and-protocol/)

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plehoux
We created a visualization called, A Brief history Of Email Apps :
[http://email-apps-timeline.missiveapp.com](http://email-apps-
timeline.missiveapp.com)

We highlight:

\- All email client ever built on major platforms on a timeline (GH issues to
add more [https://github.com/missive/email-apps-
timeline/issues](https://github.com/missive/email-apps-timeline/issues))

\- Acquisition + discontinuation

As you can see last few years have been interesting!

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eatbitseveryday
We are still using email to this day as a relied-upon means of communication
-- easy to spoof, difficult to secure, and commonly exploited for spam.

I don't see this as a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

~~~
erikb
This makes me a little speechless. If a system has these attributes that was
carefully crafted, complex, proprietary, then I would agree it's a bad thing.
But email is basically putting text in a certain format and transporting it
from A to B. It's simple and open, of course people use it to do bad things as
well.

Side note: Do you really still have problems with easy to spoof messages? Or
with spam? Especially the last one is a non-issue nowadays, I think. In the
past we had like hundreds of spam mails unfiltered in our inboxes. Now I have
a really good spam filter and checking my spam box from time to time I don't
even see that many messages popping up.

~~~
ysleepy
Haha, ever tried to set up your own mail server?

Nowadays you are de facto bound to mega providers to get reasonable mail
service. It's just not an open platform anymore if you periodically can't send
mail to 50% user base silos (yahoo, gmail, live) because of unpredictable spam
filtering and no support from them to fix it.

And you need like 1GiB of RAM just to run the spam filtering monster software
patchwork of perl spaghetti. Not even mentioning the maintanance work of
updating this stuff.

Mail is forever broken and converges to a marked with high entry barriers in
which only google and microsoft play.

~~~
jlgaddis
I've got one Barracuda left in production. It has 512 MB of RAM but handles
tens of thousands of messages a day.

Hosts running FreeBSD with 1 GB of RAM handle a few times that with ease.

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microcolonel
The feeling when you overwrite the spool instead of appending to it.

