
The History of Email (2016) - jgrahamc
https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of-email/
======
bch
> This is absolutely hilarious if your coworker happens to be using a
> graphical tool like vim...

Don't get me wrong - I love the CLI. The vast majority of my time is spent
there, and about the only reason I start X is for Firefox (if elinks won't fit
the bill).

Did make me smile to see vim referred to as "graphical", though. I like it.

------
nextos
Despite being quite young, I've used mutt (and to a lesser extent mh) during
most of my life. I am now transitioning to some combination Gnus and notmuch
do to its excellent integration with org-mode.

If you hang around lkml or any other big free software mailing list, you will
see how a big chunk of people are sending emails with either mutt or gnus.

I hate seeing how email is slowly degrading by HTML-only messages,
incompatible with many clients, or people moving to walled gardens like
WhatsApp (which is ironically a slimmed down version of XMPP, arguably THE
Internet chat protocol along with IRC).

~~~
gkya
Well you need to follow some trends your circles follow. WhatsApp is not
really like IRC as it's mostly messages between two peers, and for many it's
impractical to not use it.

I receive lots of HTML mail, most of them spam or newsletters I follow, and
then there are those where Gmail, GitHub or whatnot adds a text/html version
automatically. I just view it in the browser if it's a newsletter I expected
(and there are quite a bit of them exclusively in HTML).

We can't shape the outer world, but we can transform it a bit to fit our
needs. Gnus and Emacs helps quite a bit. I wish sth. similar existed for
WhatsApp, but they don't have APIs AFAIK.

WRT Gnus, you should use Gmane to view mailing lists if you don't already, and
with Gnus Agent you can make sure articles are available offline. Also, if you
split your e-mail carefully into relevant mailboxes and use the topics mode,
notmuch or alike become less necessary. I just work with Gnus and isearch, and
haven't yet needed any other search tool. And my favourite line of
configuration for Gnus is:

    
    
      (add-hook 'gnus-summary-prepared-hook 'gnus-summary-hide-all-threads)

~~~
unkown-unknowns
> they don't have APIs AFAIK

They don't have _public_ APIs you mean. With a bit of effort you could reverse
engineer what their app is doing. The real pain is maintaining it, keeping up
with changes. Hence why nobody bothers.

~~~
gkya
Yeah certainly what I meant.

------
dredmorbius
JoAnne Yates' "The Memo as a Management Genre" traces the origins of business
writing, including the emergence of standard fields -- "From", "To",
"Subject", "Date", and "In reply to", which actually predates the other four
-- go Mutt and threaded discussion! The influences on subsequent
communications formats, particularly Email and Usenet, aren't mentioned, but
are obvious.

Letter-writing itself, as a widespread practice, is fairly new, it relying on
post offices, stamps, and paper, and above all, literacy. The forms of letters
written in the 19th century were very much defined by guidebooks and
conventions.

Business writing itself is also highly formulaic, though it dropped much of
the verbosity (and social grace) of earlier forms, discussed in this essay.

Messaging-as-technology, the protocols, conventions, forms, usage, and
economics, are all mentioned, in particularly the induced demand created by
easier communications, storage, and retrieval (or reversal as practices were
limited or discontinued).

[http://www.ismlab.usf.edu/dcom/Ch6_YatesMemoMgtCommQtly1989....](http://www.ismlab.usf.edu/dcom/Ch6_YatesMemoMgtCommQtly1989.pdf)

------
greenyoda
_" Unix machines have a command called write which can be used to send
messages to other currently logged-in users."_

This kind of implies that "write" was a precursor to e-mail, but that's not
true. The very first Unix system I ever used (around 1980), Version 7 Unix
from Bell Labs, already had a "mail" command which let you send e-mail to
users on the same system. It kept your unread messages in a file called
/usr/spool/mail/ _userid_ , and your saved messages in $HOME/mbox. "write" (or
"wall", which wrote to all logged-in ttys) was only used to warn people that
the machine was about to come down.

~~~
rst
The first "mail" command that I'm aware of was for the MIT CTSS timesharing
system, implemented in 1965:

[http://multicians.org/thvv/anhc-34-1-anec.html](http://multicians.org/thvv/anhc-34-1-anec.html)

------
dang
A previous discussion was
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12205364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12205364).

------
ryanqian
Long live the email!

