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Communications The Internet

On the Chaotic Evolution of Email? 52

Posted by Cliff from the however-it-was-done-at-least-it-still-works dept.
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?"
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On the Chaotic Evolution of Email? More

On the Chaotic Evolution of Email?

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  • The history of any internet protocol (Score:5, Informative)

    by Marxist Hacker 42 ( 638312 ) * <seebert42@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @08:02PM (#14495517) Homepage Journal
    Can be found by reading the Requests for Comment [google.com] 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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anm ( 18575 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @09:13PM (#14495968)
      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 (Score:4, Informative)

      by TechDock ( 558245 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2006 @12:26AM (#14496790)
      Check out RFC 1000 [faqs.org], 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, [faqs.org] "On the Junk Mail Problem." They saw it coming...

    • Further, the IMC (Internet Mail Consortium) keeps a list of all the mail related RFC's, you'll find the list here [imc.org].

      Haydn.

    • Internet is only half the story (Score:4, Informative)

      by IntlHarvester ( 11985 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2006 @10:02AM (#14498904) Journal
      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.
      • 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).

        True, email didn't start with RFC 822. But surely, the products you mention are late 1980s and early 1990s things? The roots of elect

        • You're right --- PROFS was a timesharing system.

          I'm not sure when desktop email became ubitiqutious, but about 10 years I worked at a place where some people flashed their old-timer cred by having a real 3270 tube on their desk for PROFS. (And if you were really cool, you had one with a light pen.) The rest of us just used MSMail.

  • A very small datum (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @08:08PM (#14495555) Journal
    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 [computeruser.com], 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 (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Eivind ( 15695 )
      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 w

  • What I'm wondering is... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PurifyYourMind ( 776223 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @08:09PM (#14495566) Homepage
    ...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?
    • It's a chicken and egg problem- and probably never. What you see as a problem with SMTP was originally a design FEATURE- privacy wasn't a concern, encryption wasn't a concern, rich text was considered a waste of bandwidth, phishing and spam were just a gleam in a cracker's eye. The *only* concern for SMTP was SIMPLE Mail transfer between dissimilar systems- that is, OPEN COMMUNICATION. Follow a few simple rules, and you too will never need that extra stuff: 1. NEVER post your e-mail on a web page. 2.
      • 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
        • Neither will protect you from dictionary attacks.

          Who has a e-mail name that appears in a DICTIONARY?!?!?!? The closest I've ever gotten is ted@oit.osshe.state.or.us.edu, and that was a long time ago.

          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.

          Uh, don't have your e-mail name something that occurs in a dictionary?

          Common first names, first initials with common last names, role descriptions... He
          • 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
            • 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.
          • Who has a e-mail name that appears in a DICTIONARY?
             
            Me.
             
            I run a theatre and my email address is theatre@myisp. (I also have theater@myisp because a lot of people can't spell theatre correctly.)
            • Why not change it to theater1 and thus escape the dictionary attacks? Or theatre1?
              • I think you're misinterpreting the term "dictionary attack." It doesn't mean that the spammer runs through the Oxford English Dictionary and tries each word. It means that the spammer is making a systematic effort to locate valid addresses. An attack against example.com might go like this:

                aaaa@example.com
                aaab@example.com
                aaac@example.com ...
                zzzz@example.com

                Or it might go like this:

                aardvark@example.com
                apple@example.com
                bacon@example.com

                Or maybe

                alice@example.com
                bob@example.com
                carl@example.com

                Or perhaps

                webmas
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
            • What dictionary includes names with a dash? Much more likely is that you've got it on a web page someplace.
              • Comment removed based on user account deletion
                • I'm beginning to think this dictionary attack from spam idea is largely an explanation looking for a problem. It's far more likely that it's a directory attack that you're mistaking for a dictionary attack- that the "lesser known mailserver" has a directory page that was hit by a crawler, thus harvesting the e-mail address.
                  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

                  • I'm beginning to think this dictionary attack from spam idea is largely an explanation looking for a problem.

                    Well then, you're just a dumbass.

                    I'm sorry, I meant "inexperienced".

                    I am sure that most people who have managed email for a domain have seen dictionary attacks many, many times. How do you think e-mail ends up at a "sales@" email address when one never existed, and therefore wasn't published on the web or appeared in some kind of directory?

                    Seriously, your arguments are week; those who run thei

          • I had a dictionary word for an email address at a previous company .... this a is quite a few years back now but they seemed to be using first initial plus first two letters of surname ... at least my mail id was the@........

            The mail was on PrimOS i think, (Text/Memo?), and it meant that i frequently got strange emails where someone internally would start typing the subject line in the wrong field and if they had a "the" in it then i was copied on the mail!

            t

  • Rejected (Score:4, Funny)

    by ArsonSmith ( 13997 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @08:21PM (#14495647) Journal
    Of course my article gets rejected

    Ask Slashdot: On the Catholic Intelligent Design of Email?

  • What evolution? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by redelm ( 54142 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @08:22PM (#14495664) Homepage
    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 (Score:4, Informative)

    by Mendy ( 468439 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @08:27PM (#14495697)
    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 [amazon.co.uk]

    Provides a good background to how the internet came about, including a chapter on email.
  • Will get you going.

  • Email before networks (Score:4, Informative)

    by klossner ( 733867 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @08:46PM (#14495834)
    There was email long before there were networks. http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html [multicians.org] describes early email on Multics, between multiple users time-sharing one mainframe.

    • Re:Email before networks (Score:3, Interesting)

      by WGR ( 32993 )
      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

      • In my experience I would say that email has only really worked its way down to very small businesses in about the last three years. For about ten years before that, if you were in business you had to have a fax machine "I'll fax that to you", heard ten times a day. Now, you still have to have the fax machine but everyone also expects to be able to send you email.

  • Bang paths (Score:5, Informative)

    by MarkusQ ( 450076 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @10:59PM (#14496425) Journal

    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

    • How many line ending conventions do you suppose there were back in the day? Ever hear of the ASCII characters FS, GS, and RS?


      I don't think File/Group/Record Separators where really considered line ending conventions.
      • And in many ways field and record seperators make alot more sense than using delimiting characters such as , ; or : that most things are using now what with all the escaping that has to be done.

      • How many line ending conventions do you suppose there were back in the day? Ever hear of the ASCII characters FS, GS, and RS?

        I don't think File/Group/Record Separators where really considered line ending conventions.

        You wouldn't think so, would you? Somebody (and I don't recall who) used to pass along email with RS between lines, GS between the header and the body (and, if I recall correctly, US to delimit stuff in the header) and FS between messages.

        And not everyone used eight bit ASCII. Or eve

  • Origins of Multimedia mail (Score:3, Informative)

    by feijai ( 898706 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @11:10PM (#14496474)
    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.
    • Mark was also influential in the IMAP protocol and U Washington's MailManager software. And though he was not liked in comp.sys.next.* (_really_ not liked), you can't argue with what he produced.

      Here's [google.com] quite an illuminating link on google groups.

    • My favorite (off topic) excerpt from these posts:

      135. Mark Crispin -- Jul 10 1991, 1:25 am [google.com]

      >(Andreas Windemuth) writes:
      >I guess you need to weed out the X-terminals and buy some decent
      >computers instead

      I'm afraid the chance of that happening is about the same as a Democrat being elected president next year.

    • I always thought it to be ironic that NeXTMail was considered "neato", but when Microsoft started spamming the world with RTF parts, everyone was outraged.

      Mark began working on a related project: MIME. This was done at U Washington, which developed MIME in conjunction with pine and pico.

      I guess that explains why old versions of Pine understand RTF but have no clue what to do with HTML.

  • Look @ this! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Bob Cat - NYMPHS ( 313647 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2006 @11:21PM (#14496524) Homepage
    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 [bbn.com]

    "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."
  • judging from the subject lines of the spam i get i would say it's more chaotic evil

  • email + directory evolution (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I started a firm in 1985 that specialized in design and implementation of email systems. this usually required linking some existing mail services (PROFS, DISOSS, All-in-One, Wang Office, etc) together with online services (MCI Mail, Compuserve, etc) and LAN based mail (MHS compliant products, VINES Mail, CC:Mail, Quickmail, many others). In addition there were the first generations of Mail-enabled products (group calenders and other groupware) that had their own benefits and requirements.

    ISO protocols and
  • I just wanted to say thanks to everybody that replied. I may be in touch with a few of you in the near future, if you don't mind.

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