The history of email

My first access to “the internet” was through a dialup modem on a VAX at the FDA. I was a summer intern there through my college career and then worked full time after graduation and before grad school. My email address ended in .bitnet. I could mail some places but not others. One of the places I couldn’t send mail was to my friends back on campus.
A few of those friends were computer science majors, so one weekend they tried to help me troubleshoot things. . There were text files that they ended up searching through looking up how to send mail from .bitnet to .edu. But it was all a baffling experience. Why couldn’t it just work? I had email, they had email, why could we not talk?
I never did figure out how to send email to campus from .bitnet.
Eventually, the FDA moved from BITNET to the internet and I had a .gov address. I could send mail around just by getting the recipients’s address. But the mystery of why I could mail some .edus and not others still lingers. I wonder what our setup was that we couldn’t send mail. I’ll probably never know. I don’t even have enough details to explain the problem to someone who would know. I suspect the answer will be “bang paths” or “host.txt” files, but I really don’t know.

Image of a DEC VAX
By Emiliano Russo, Associazione Culturale VerdeBinario – VAX_11-780_all.jpg, Public Domain
That’s one of the reasons I like reading articles about email before SMTP and before email clients. Today’s article was The History of Email posted by Zach Bloom at eager.io. Some things I knew, like how a line starting with the word From had to be escaped (although typically the client handled that). And that mutt is the mail client that sucks less. (I miss mutt, and still use it occasionally for bulk IMAP functions.) Some things I didn’t know, or didn’t remember. It’s possible I used MH back on that old VAX. It certainly wasn’t mutt or pine we used.
It’s an article well worth a read just to learn about the people who created SMTP. We’re also lucky that some of the folks named in the articles are still around and are still contributing to the life and growth of email. Their knowledge and institutional memory helps us map out the future.
 

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Confusing the engineers

We went camping last weekend with a bunch of friends. Had a great time relaxing on the banks of the Tuolumne River, eating way too much and visiting.
On Saturday I was wearing a somewhat geeky t-shirt. It said 554: abort mission. (Thank you MessageSystems). At some point on Saturday every engineer came up to me, read my shirt and then looked at me and said “That’s not HTTP.”
That lead to various discussions about how their junior engineers don’t actually know SMTP at all. Why? Because the SMTP libraries just work. Apparently the HTTP libraries aren’t that great, so folks have to learn more about HTTP to troubleshoot and use them.
I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere: A Kindle engineer, an Android engineer and a robot engineer walk into a campsite…
EmailFilters_boxes_forblogIt did leave me thinking, though, about how it’s not that easy to run your own mail server these days. Gone are the days when running your own server was cost effective and easy. These days, there is just too much spam coming in. Crafting filters is a skilled job. It’s not that hard to run good filters. But to run good filters takes time to do well.
There are also a lot of challenges to sending mail. One of the discussions I had at the campsite was how hard it was to configure outbound mail. The engineer was helping a friend set up a website and trying to get the website to send notifications to the friend. But without setting up authentication the mail kept silently failing.
Of course, we do run our own mail server. But it’s our job and, in many ways, it keeps us honest. We don’t run many filters meaning we see what spammers are doing and can use our own experiences to better understand what commercial filters are dealing with.
For most people, though, I really think using a service is the right solution. Find one with filters that meet your needs and just pay them to deal with the headache.
 

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Memories of Spam in May

This morning on Facebook a friend posted a picture saying that 15 years ago was the very first anti-spam conference (Spamcon*). All we have are some blurry scans of pictures and coffee mugs.
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That 550 sign belonged to the bar where the night out was held. It got bought by K & P and lived in their garden until it rotted away a few years ago. So many folks who are still active in the space, and so many folks who’ve moved on. Names I’d forgotten, faces I haven’t.
Many of those folks are still working in email. Some on the sending side, some on the tools and vendor side, some on the ISP side, some on the consulting side.  That conference was one of the very first times people publicly gathered to talk about spam. There were other occasions, but most were invite only with hand picked representatives of specific companies.
At that first Spamcon I was freshly laid off from MAPS (now Trend Micro). I was considering what next. The thing is, I really liked the work I was doing. MAPS had me leading a team to provide abuse desk as an outsourced service. We had a very large network provider as a customer and we were handling all the mail that came into abuse@ there. It was a challenge, I was creating processes and documenting policy, trying to do more with less and managing my first team ever.
Much of what I do now, here, grew out of that position. It was clear even then there was a need for someone who could help navigate the challenges of email.
In the same thread another person posted pictures from a social night in DC during the FTC Spam Forum. More folks, some I have lost touch with and some who are still friends and colleagues.
We were so young. All of us.
This is yet another form of community that email created. Some of it was built over email, but a lot of it happened on USENET and IRC and local meetups. There were so many ways we built community using plain text and dialup. The technology has changed, and that community from a dozen years ago has changed but it’s still all the same deep down inside.
SpamconMugs
 
(* If, at any point, you see me type Spamconk instead of Spamcon please blame autocorrect. It’s being difficult and even tries to correct it when I go back and edit sentences.)

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SHOUTY CAPS!!!

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Over at Meh Glenn Fleishman has put together a fascinating two-parter on the history of using ALL CAPS for emphasis. And SHOUTING.

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