Development of E-mail

A predecessor to modern e-mail was developed at MIT in 1965 for the universities time-sharing mainframes. Although limited to a single machine, it allowed users to leave messages for each other. By the following year, the technology had become networked, allowing users to send messages between different machines (Leiner et al., 1999)

With the development of ARPANET, e-mail become widespread with messages being transmitted over an increasingly wide area.

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson developed an application called SNDMSG which was the first to be able to send messages between hosts via the ARPANET. He is also responsible for introducing the use of the at-symbol (@) in e-mail addresses. Under Tomlinson’s convention, e-mail addresses are written in the form user@host (where host is the name of the computer system). It would not however become a universal system for e-mail addresses until the late 1980s (Cavender, 1998).

E-mail rapidly became an early “killer app” with e-mail messages accounting 75% of ARPANET traffic in 1973.

The first document attempting to standardise E-mail was RFC #822 Standard for the format of ARPANET Text Messages (Crocker, 1982). This document served as the de-facto standard until RFC #2822 was published in 2001 – which is still officially a recommendation (Resnick, 2001).

Social Impact of E-mail

The initial success of e-mail was in part driven by it’s ability to allow free, real-time messaging between the users of computer systems – regardless of physical proximity. This was a large advance over previous technologies.

E-mail also opened new possibilities, such as the ability for mail to be checked from any networked computer. This allowed travellers to check their e-mail from remote locations and over time changed the way business was conducted. This trend has continued today with the development of mobile e-mail devices such as the RIM Blackberry.

Disadvantages of E-mail

Spam

Unfortunately, e-mail has also had negative effects on society. The most obvious of these has been the proliferation of unsolicited junk e-mail – commonly known as Spam. The name Spam is thought to have been inspired by a 1970 Monty Python sketch about Spam. A 2001 European Commission report estimates the cost of simply receiving Spam at approximately €10 Billion (EC, 2001).

Spam has become extremely common on the Internet for two main reasons:

  1. Cost of sending millions of e-mails is extremely low,
  2. Reachable audience is so large, a small but significant number of people will purchase those products – thus making the exercise worthwhile.

Lack of Privacy

E-mail was never intended for the uses it is now fulfilling, and security and privacy was not considered during the development of the technology. Today, e-mail privacy causes a host of legal and ethical issues.

The primary reason for E-mails lack of privacy is that messages are sent in cleartext – no encryption or security measures have been applied for transmission. Therefore, it is a trivial matter to intercept an E-mail message during transit. Also, E-mail servers often store unencrypted backup copies of messages, these can remain available in a system for months or years after the transmission of the original message.

Encryption measures have been applied to E-mail in several ways to aid the security of the medium: