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EMail! Some Basic Facts

Here is a little bit of info all about the origins of email, terms used, and even what may be in store for the future! Certainly some worthy material!

Electronic Mail or E-mail, is used to send information from one person to another, or from one person to many almost instantaneously. The information that can be passed can be text, data, graphic or audio. This technology is said to be replacing the more conventional methods of communication, such as, phone and postal services (Cross, 3).

Throughout the 1960's and 70's, employees within the same company could send messages back and forth between each other via their computer. Eventually, companies could connect their central systems to branch offices and employees could communicate on an international basis.

In the 1960's educational institutions in the United States began to use electronic mail. The initial intention was to ensure that should a nuclear fall out occur, educational and historical information would not be lost. Eventually, email was used to share information and research among scholars (http://nml.ru.ac.za/carr/~michelle/START2.HTML).

Electronic mail was first used in 1971 by ARPANET. (This was the original large-scale network.) ARPANET was funded by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), which was set up by the US department of defense.

ARPANET was established for quick transfer of data during the Cold War. ARPANET's aim was "'to help maintain US technological superiority and guard against unforeseen technological advances by potential adversaries.'" Thanks to ARPANET, email began to become popular, but was mostly used as a social medium. Due to free access, email became a huge success (a result of government funding).

The social aspects of email surprised its inventors, who never intended it for this purpose. Historically, e-mail was a productivity tool that was considered proprietary or vendor-specific. Meaning, the early systems would not able to exchange information from one system to a different system.

In the late eighties stand alone personal computers were the hottest thing on the market. The new invention was to place PC's on Local Area Networks to increase productivity. This PC LAN email was incorporated with other PC desktop applications. (At the time these email systems were limited to workgroups.) In the mid-nineties the client server trend took over (http://www.cs.tcd.ie/courses/baict/bac/jf/projects/98/email/orla.html).

Email Message Retrieval
When an e-mail is received into a mailbox, the application program stores it into a repository. When the "mail" is retrieved from the repository, the message is sent accordingly. This "non-simultaneous communication" is handy, because it does not require the sender and the receiver to be logged on at the same time (Rik Drummond & Nancy Cox, E-mail Resource Guide, 1994. pg 5).

Email Jargon
-UA was on a remote computer (PC LAN email)
-MTA and mailboxes were on a mainframe/minicomputer server like a host-based system. The mainframe computers could scale to encompass all server functions into one computer.
-SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol): MTA uses a mail transfer protocol called SMTP. This type of email transfers messages over any network, reliably and efficiently. Its message format is seven bit ASCII.
-HTML: (hypertext markup language) what Web pages are written in
-HTTP: (Hypertext Transfer Pool) a computer protocol that allows information to be sent across the net to meet the demands of the hypertext global system.
-Java: a programming language used and designed for embedded email devices. Java became a language for small applications that run with a web browser (applets).
-LAN: Local Area Networks
(References: Tim Berners-Lee author of Weaving the Web pg. 233-235).

Local Area Networks
"A LAN, or local area network, is a group of computers, printers or other hardware that are all connected in a reasonably small geographic location like a office or home." Local Area networks allow connected users to exchange files and applications that normally would exist on a server or some type of shared computer.

The purpose of a LANs is to let people and computers share information. A server can have an application or database that is accessed by all the other computers on the LAN. This allows for the information to shared almost instantaneously.

Email Costs and Future
Forrester LAN Cost Study printed in the January 1993 issue of Network World, found the average costs per user for LAN support was $1280. Of the $1280, about 59% of that is used by the LAN administrator to do support tasks (Drummond, 5). Just imagine what the cost would be in the present.

Forrester Research also predicted that in 2001 consumers will send 50 million electronic product information or service inquiries per day and that total email traffic will grow from 100 million messages per day in 1996 to 500 million per day. (Our class lecture notes states that there are approximately 600 million people to date.) (http://www.cs.tcd.ie/courses/baict/bac/jf/projects/98/email/latest.html)

Drummond, Rik and Cox, Nancy. Email resource guide. Osborne McGraw-Hill, 1994

Berners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web. Harper Collins Publishers Inc., New York, NY. 2000.