Mark Reed Crispin (July 19, 1956 in Camden, New Jersey – December 28, 2012 in Poulsbo, Washington[1]) is best known as the father of the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), having invented it in 1985 during his time at the Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory.
During that time, he wrote the infamous RFC 748, the only document specifically marked in the RFC index with note date of issue; and a series of Telnet implementations for the Incompatible Timesharing System, WAITS, and TOPS-20 operating systems whose escape behavior was playfully immortalized by Guy Steele in the April 1984 Communications of the ACM as The Telnet Song.
While working at UW, Mark was one of the creators of the simple and portable Unix email program Pine, launched in March 1992.
At Messaging Architects, he wrote an entirely new IMAP server based upon a distributed mail store, and extended the MIX format to support stubbing (via a mechanism called virtual mailboxes) and metadata.
On 19 November 2012, it was announced that Crispin was terminally ill and in hospice care,[9] and he died on December 28, 2012.