Electronic mail, commonly called email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages across the Internet or other computer networks. Originally, email was transmitted directly from one user to another computer. This required both computers to be online at the same time, a la instant messenger. Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver and store messages. Users no longer need be online simultaneously and need only connect briefly, typically to an email server, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages.
An email message consists of two components, the message header, and the message body, which is the email's content. The message header contains control information, including, minimally, an originator's email address and one or more recipient addresses. Usually additional information is added, such as a subject header field.
Originally a text-only communications medium, email was extended to carry multi-media content attachments, a process standardized in RFC 2045 through 2049. Collectively, these RFCs have come to be called Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME).
The history of modern, global Internet email services reaches back to the early ARPANET. Standards for encoding email messages were proposed as early as 1973 (RFC 561). Conversion from ARPANET to the Internet in the early 1980s produced the core of the current services. An email sent in the early 1970s looks quite similar to one sent on the Internet today.
Network-based email was initially exchanged on the ARPANET in extensions to the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), but is now carried by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published as Internet standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982. In the process of transporting email messages between systems, SMTP communicates delivery parameters using a message envelope separate from the message (header and body) itself.
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Spelling
There are several spelling variations that occasionally prove cause for surprisingly vehement disagreement.[2][3]
- email is the form required by IETF Requests for Comment and working groups[4] This spelling also appears in most dictionaries.[5][6][7][8][9][10]
- e-mail is a form recommended by some prominent journalistic and technical style guides.[11][12]
- mail was the form used in the original RFC. The service is referred to as mail and a single piece of electronic mail is called a message.[13][14][15]
- eMail, capitalizing only the letter M, was common among ARPANET users and the early developers of Unix, CMS, AppleLink, eWorld, AOL, GEnie, and Hotmail.[citation needed]
- EMail is a traditional form that has been used in RFCs for the "Author's Address",[14][15] and is expressly required "...for historical reasons...".[16]
Origin
Electronic mail predates the inception of the Internet, and was in fact a crucial tool in creating it.
MIT first demonstrated the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) in 1961.[17] It allowed multiple users to log into the IBM 7094[18] from remote dial-up terminals, and to store files online on disk. This new ability encouraged users to share information in new ways. Email started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. Among the first systems to have such a facility were SDC's Q32 and MIT's CTSS.
Host-based mail systems
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The original email systems allowed communication only between users who logged into the same host or "mainframe". This could be hundreds or even thousands of users within an organization.
By 1966 (or earlier, it is possible that the SAGE system had something similar some time before), such systems allowed email between different organizations, so long as they ran compatible operating systems.
Examples include BITNET, IBM PROFS, Digital Equipment Corporation ALL-IN-1 and the original Unix mail.
LAN-based mail systems
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From the early 1980s, networked personal computers on LANs became increasingly important. Server-based systems similar to the earlier mainframe systems were developed. Again these systems initially allowed communication only between users logged into the same server infrastructure. Eventually these systems could also be linked between different organizations, as long as they ran the same email system and proprietary protocol.
Examples include cc:Mail, Lantastic, WordPerfect Office, Microsoft Mail, Banyan VINES and Lotus Notes - with various vendors supplying gateway software to link these incompatible systems.
Attempts at interoperability
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- Novell briefly championed the open MHS protocol but abandoned it after purchasing the non-MHS WordPerfect Office (renamed Groupwise)
- uucp was used as an open "glue" between differing mail systems
- The Coloured Book protocols on UK academic networks until 1992
- X.400 in the early 1990s was mandated for government use under GOSIP but almost immediately abandoned by all but a few — in favour of Internet SMTP
From SNDMSG to MSG
In the early 1970s, Ray Tomlinson updated an existing utility called SNDMSG so that it could copy files over the network. Lawrence Roberts, the project manager for the ARPANET development, updated READMAIL and called the program RD. Barry Wessler then updated RD and called it NRD.[citation needed]
Marty Yonke combined SNDMSG and NRD to include reading, sending, and a help system, and called the utility WRD. John Vittal then updated this version to include message forwarding and an Answer command to create replies with the correct address, and called it MSG. With inclusion of these features, MSG is considered to be the first modern email program, from which many other applications have descended.[19]
The rise of ARPANET mail
The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the development of e-mail. There is one report that indicates experimental inter-system e-mail transfers began shortly after its creation in 1969.[20] Ray Tomlinson is credited by some as having sent the first email, initiating the use of the "@" sign to separate the names of the user and the user's machine in 1971, when he sent a message from one Digital Equipment Corporation DEC-10 computer to another DEC-10. The two machines were placed next to each other.[21][22] The ARPANET significantly increased the popularity of e-mail, and it became the killer app of the ARPANET.
Most other networks had their own email protocols and address formats; as the influence of the ARPANET and later the Internet grew, central sites often hosted email gateways that passed mail between the Internet and these other networks. Internet email addressing is still complicated by the need to handle mail destined for these older networks. Some well-known examples of these were UUCP (mostly Unix computers), BITNET (mostly IBM and VAX mainframes at universities), FidoNet (personal computers), DECNET (various networks) and CSNET a forerunner of NSFNet.
An example of an Internet email address that routed mail to a user at a UUCP host:
hubhost!middlehost!edgehost!user@uucpgateway.somedomain.example.com
This was necessary because in early years UUCP computers did not maintain (or consult servers for) information about the location of all hosts they exchanged mail with, but rather only knew how to communicate with a few network neighbors; email messages (and other data such as Usenet News) were passed along in a chain among hosts who had explicitly agreed to share data with each other.
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account to trick domain owners out ... Australia.TO There is no company identity on the emails and a disclaimer at the bottom is intended to prevent victims from passing on the email to authorities or ...
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follow your steps and make a few extra phone calls The policy may have more to do with the Post s rival the Daily News than with blogs but it appears to apply across the board In an email to Miss Heather Ginsberg wrote The rule is this if every detail fact and quote can be independently verified then we don t have to credit anyone I put in a call yesterday
