History of email
Informal methods of using shared files to pass messages were soon expanded into the first mail systems.
Some systems also supported a form of instant messaging, where sender and receiver needed to be online simultaneously.
[2][3][4][5] Over a series of RFCs, conventions were refined for sending mail messages over the File Transfer Protocol.
Hewlett-Packard launched HPMAIL (later HP DeskManager) in 1982, which became the world's largest selling email system.
Telex became an operational teleprinter service in 1933, beginning in Germany and Europe, and after 1945 spread around the world.
[15] CompuServe rebranded its electronic mail service as EMAIL in April 1981, which popularized the term.
[16][17] The June 1979 usage of E-mail referred to the United States Postal Service (USPS) project called Electronic Computer Originated Mail, which they abbreviated E-COM.
The service launched in 1982, allowing corporate customers to send electronic mail to a post office branch from where it was printed and delivered in the normal way.
[22] Informal methods of using such shared files to pass messages were soon developed and expanded into the first mail systems.
[82][83] In early 1971, Ray Tomlinson updated an existing utility called SNDMSG so that it could copy messages (as files) over the network.
[84] In July 1972, Abhay Bhusan, a professor at MIT, was writing the final specs of the ARPANET file-transfer protocol.
[86][87][85] Lawrence Roberts, the project manager for the ARPANET development, took the idea of READMAIL, which dumped all "recent" messages onto the user's terminal, and wrote a program for TENEX in TECO macros called RD, which permitted access to individual messages.
[89] Marty Yonke rewrote NRD to include reading, access to SNDMSG for sending, and a help system, and called the utility WRD, which was later known as BANANARD.
With inclusion of these features, MSG is considered to be the first integrated modern electronic mail program, from which many other applications have descended.
[88] ARPANET defined conventions from 1973 for dissimilar computers to exchange mail using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) over a homogeneous network.
The use of the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) for "network mail" was proposed in RFC 469 in March 1973.
[93] INWG discussed protocols for electronic mail in 1979,[94] which was referenced by Jon Postel in his early work on Internet email.
After the introduction of the Domain Name System (DNS) in 1985, mail routing was updated in January 1986 by RFC 974.
As the influence of the ARPANET spread across academic communities, gateways were developed to pass mail to and from other networks such as CSNET, JANET, BITNET, X.400, and FidoNet.
POP and IMAP enabled connections with remote e-mail servers that contain users’ mailboxes.
