Email, i.e. Email

E-mail, e-mail is an Internet service, defined in the legal nomenclature as the provision of electronic services, used to send text or multimedia messages, the so-called e-mails - hence the common name of this service. Learn how email has evolved since 1536 in the article below.

1536 The @ (1) sign appears in a letter sent from Seville to Rome by the Florentine merchant Francesco Lapi, describing the arrival of three ships from the Americas. “There is an amphora of wine equal to a third of the capacity of a barrel, worth 70 or 80 thalers,” the merchant wrote, shortening the word “amphora” to an “a” surrounded by its own tail: “one @ wine.” Since the amphora is called "arroba" in Spanish, it is this @ sign that is still used in Spain and Portugal. Another theory is that the @ sign is even older. As early as the XNUMXth or XNUMXth century, monks could use it as an abbreviation for the Latin "ad". This saves time, space and ink.

Since the symbol was captured by merchants, trade routes it spread throughout Europe and was especially popular with the British. Vendors there used it to refer to the price per item, such as "two cases of wine at 10 shillings" (i.e. "10 shillings for one"). This is why the @ symbol appeared on American and English typewriter keyboards in the 1963 century. Also, when the ASCII character encoding standard was agreed in '95, the @ symbol was among the XNUMX printable characters.

1. First use of the @ sign

1962 The US military network AUTODIN provides messaging between 1350 terminals, processing 30 million messages per month with an average message length of about 3000 characters. Before 1968 AUTODIN has connected more than three hundred points in several countries.

1965 email was invented in 1965. The authors of the idea were: Louis Pouzin, Glenda Schroeder and Pat Crisman from CTSS MIT. It was implemented by Tom Van Vleck and Noel Morris. However, at that time this service was used only for sending messages between users of the same computerand the email address didn't exist yet. Each user's messages were added to a local file called "MAILBOX" which had a "private" mode so that only the owner could read or delete the messages. This proto-mail system was used to notify users that files were zipped, as well as for discussion between CTSS command authors and command writer communication in the CTSS manual editor.

Немного computer in that era, they could have up to a hundred users. They often used simple terminals to access the main computer from their desks. they just connected to a central machine - they had no memory or their own memory, all the work was done on a remote mainframe. However, as computers began to communicate with each other over the network, the problem became a little more complicated. There was a need to address messages, i.e. specify who they should reach on the network.

1971-72 MIT graduate named Ray Tomlinson (2) becomes the first person to transmit a message from one computer to another, although it took years before anyone named the practice El. mail. Tomlinson worked for the engineering firm Bolt Beranek and Newman (now Raytheon BBN), which was commissioned by the US Department of Defense to build the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the forerunner of the Internet as we know it today. In those days computers were isolated from each otherand also extremely expensive, so each one was used by dozens of different people, and notes for other users were thrown into numbered mailboxes.

While exploring the possibilities of using the network, Tomlinson came up with the idea of ​​combining an internal messaging program with another program to transfer files between computers. ARPANETs and used the @ symbol in it to separate the recipient's name from the recipient's address. The exact date of sending the first message is unknown. Some sources say that this is 1971, others - 1972. It's also unclear - Tomlinson himself claims it was "a kind of QWERTY", which should imply the random nature of the news. At the time, he was using Digital PDP 10 computers, which were two-meter cabinets. Both machines (each with 288 KB of memory) were connected via the ARPANET. For the first time, Tomlinson received a message sent from another computer.

1973 Members of the Internet Engineering Group, referring to Tomlinson's idea, agreed in the RFC 469 proposal a standard syntax for email communication: [email protected]

1978 Spam, the scourge of email, not much younger than mail itself. The forerunner of spam is Gary Turk, marketing manager for the now defunct computer company Digital Equipment Corporation, who sent out bulk emails promoting his company's computer products.

Tuerk's message, sent to hundreds of computers over the ARPANET, immediately provoked outrage from the audience and reproaches from network administrators. E-mail it is now widely regarded as the first example of spam, although the term was first used for unsolicited bulk email many years later. The term is believed to have been inspired by a 70s television sketch shown in Monty Python's Flying Circus in which a group of Vikings sing a refrain about spam, a meat product.

3. Spam song "Monty Python's Flying Circus"

1978-79 Early ISP offerings CompuServe El. mail within your corporate business Infoplex services.

1981 CompuServe is changing the name of its email service to "E-MAIL". He would later apply for a US trademark, which would mean that the term could not be used freely. However, this name was not ultimately reserved.

1981 At the beginning to send El. mail The CPYNET communication protocol was used.. It was later used Ftp, UUCP and many other protocols. In 1982, Jon Postel developed for this purpose SMTP protocol (4) is still in use today. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), used for sending email messages to mail servers, was first created in 1981 but has since been updated and expanded many times to provide authentication, encryption, and other improvements. The standard was defined in an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) document called RFC 821 and then updated in 2008 in RFC 5321.

SMTP is a relatively simple text protocol., which specifies at least one recipient of the message (in most cases, it checks for its existence), and then forwards the contents of the message. SMTP daemon, i.e. feedback from the recipient's mail server, usually works on port 25. It is easy to check the operation of the SMTP server using the telnet program. This protocol did not work well with binary files because it was based on plain ASCII text. Standards such as MIME (early 90s) were developed to encode binary files for transmission over SMTP. Most SMTP servers currently support the 8BITMIME extension, which allows binary files to be transferred as easily as text. SMTP does not allow you to receive messages from a remote server. For this, the POP3 or IMAP protocols are used.

1983 The first commercial email service available in the US - Mail MCIlaunched by MCI Communications Corp.

1984-88 The first version of the mail protocol POP1was described in RFC 918 (1984). POP2 was described in RFC 937 (1985). POP3 is the most used version. It is derived from RFC 1081 (1988), but the most recent specification is RFC 1939, updated to include an extension mechanism (RFC 2449) and an authentication mechanism in RFC 1734. This has led to many POP implementations such as Pine, POPmail, and other early email programs. 

1985 The first programs that allow you to use e-mail offline. Development of "offline readers". Offline readers allowed email users to store their messages on their personal computers and then read them and prepare responses without actually being connected to the network. Currently, the most famous program that allows you to do this is Microsoft Outlook.

1986 Temporary Mail Access Protocol, IMAP (5) was designed Brand Crispina in 1986 as a protocol remote mailbox access, as opposed to the widely used POP, a protocol for easily retrieving the contents of a mailbox. This protocol has gone through several iterations up to the current VERSION 4rev1 (IMAP4).

The original Interim Mail Access Protocol was implemented as a client. Xerox Lisp machines i TOPS-20 server. There are no copies of the original timing protocol specification or its software. Although some of its commands and responses were similar to IMAP2, the interim protocol did not have command/response markers and therefore its syntax was incompatible with all other versions of IMAP.

Unlike POP3which only allows you to download and delete mail, IMAP allows you to manage multiple mail folders, as well as download and manage lists residing on a remote server. IMAP allows you to download message headers and choose which messages you want to download to your local computer. It allows you to perform multiple operations, manage folders and messages. IMAP4 uses TCP and port 143 while IMAPS also uses TCP and port 993.

1990 The first email in the history of Poland was sent on November 20, 1990. (between 10.57 and 13.25) from the headquarters of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva by Dr. Grzegorz Polok and MSc. Pavel Yaloha. It was delivered to user %[email protected]' and picked up by M.Sc. English Andrzej Sobala at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Krakow. 

1991-92 Birth of Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook (6)

6. Lotus Notes vs Microsoft Outlook

1993 Philip Hallam-Baker, a cybersecurity expert working for CERN, develops the first version of Webmail, mail is processed not by a special program, but by a web browser (7). His version, however, was only a trial and was never published. Yahoo! The Post Office offered a website access service in 1997.

7. Email login page in browser

1999 start-up mobile mail on BlackBerry phones (8). These devices have become popular in part because BlackBerry offers mobile email services.

8. One of the first BlackBerry models with email support.

2007 Google shares Gmail mail service after four years of beta testing. Gmail was founded in 2004 as a project Paula Bucejta. Initially, they did not really believe in it as a product under Google. Three years passed before the decision was made to register users without an invitation. In technical terms, it was distinguished by the fact that it was a program that was much closer to a desktop application (using AJAX). The offer of 1 GB of memory in the mailbox was also an impression at that time.

9. History of the Gmail logo

Email classification

webmail type email

Multiple Suppliers El. mail offers a mail client based on web browser (such as AOL Mail, Gmail, Outlook.com, and Yahoo! Mail). This allows users to log in E-mail address using any compatible web browser to send and receive e-mail. Mail is not usually downloaded to the web client, so it cannot be read without a current Internet connection.

POP3 mail servers

Mail Protocol 3 (POP3) is a mail access protocol used by a client application to read messages from a mail server. Received messages are often deleted from the server. POP supports simple download and delete requirements for accessing remote mailboxes (called mailing in the POP RFC). POP3 allows you to download email messages to your local computer and read them even when you are offline.

IMAP email servers

Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) provides features that allow you to manage your mailbox from multiple devices. Small portable devices such as smartphones are increasingly being used to check email while traveling and provide short replies, while larger devices with better keyboard access are used for longer replies. IMAP shows the message headers, sender, and subject, and the device must request that specific messages be downloaded. Usually, mail stays in folders on the mail server.

MAPI mail servers

Messaging API (MAPI) is used by Microsoft Outlook to communicate with Microsoft Exchange Server, as well as a number of other mail servers such as Axigen Mail Server, Kerio Connect, Scalix, Zimbra, HP OpenMail, IBM Lotus Notes, Zarafa and Bynari, where vendors have added MAPI support to allow access to your products directly through Outlook.

Types of file name extensions in email

When email is received, email client applications save messages to operating system files on the file system. Some store individual messages as separate files, while others use other, often proprietary, database formats for collective storage. The historical data storage standard is the mbox format. The particular format used is often indicated by special filename extensions:

• EML - used by many email clients, including Novell GroupWise, Microsoft Outlook Express, Lotus notes, Windows Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Postbox. These files contain the body of the email message in plain text in MIME format, containing the header and body of the message, including attachments in one or more formats.
• emlks - using Apple Mail.
• MSG – Microsoft Office Outlook and OfficeLogic Groupware are used.
• MBH – used by Opera Mail, KMail and Apple Mail based on the mbox format.

Some apps (such as Apple Mail) leave encrypted attachments in searchable messages while keeping individual copies of the attachments. Others separate attachments from messages and store them in a specific directory.