Ray Tomlinson

Ray Tomlinson has passed away. Mainstream obituaries are going to focus on his being “the creator of email” or “the sender of the first email” or “the inventor of the @ sign in email addresses“.
All of which are true. He did send the first (networked) email. He did use the (otherwise mostly unused on TENEX) @ sign to separate user and host.
But he did a lot of other things with the basics of the modern Internet that are more important than the @-sign.

I just learned that Ray Tomlinson died this morning.
Ray Tomlinson had been at BBN since 1967.  He’s best known for inventing the concept of sending email over a computer network and choosing the @ sign as the way to split the mailbox name from the host name.
But that’s a fraction of his amazing contributions to our field. Ray was one of a four person team that created TENEX, the first operating system to support virtual memory using paging. He wrote one of the first implementations of TCP and, when he found data being duplicated in the received stream, devised methods to ensure that sequence numbers were not duplicated that remain fundamental to TCP/IP implementations today. He worked on the first object-oriented distributed system and early multimedia email systems.  And I’m sure I’m forgetting at least half a dozen other ways Ray made our world better.
— Craig Partridge

 

I knew and worked with Ray Tomlinson during the development of the ARPANET and its host protocols and benefited, as have billions, from his seminal work on networked electronic email. More important, from my personal perspective, was his work with Bill Plummer on the first PDP-10 TENEX implementation of TCP (and later TCP/IP). In 1975, he discovered that the TCP as specified in December 1974 had flaws that led it to fail to detect duplicate packets and, together with Yogen Dalal, developed the three-way handshake and initial sequence number selection method to solve this problem.
As Craig Partridge summarizes, Ray was a long-time and creative contributor to the Internet, operating systems, and many other highly practical applications in the computer science and communications domains. He was a self-effacing and humble man and extraordinary performer in our online world. I will miss his thoughtful, low-key and always helpful counsel.
— Vint Cerf

 

Years ago my daughter had an elementary school project about “inventions”. She loved emailing her friends so I contacted Ray and he agreed to be interviewed for her project. He was very kind and patient, answering every question in a way a kid could understand. He seemed like a very nice guy.
— /u/mazerrackham

“I see email being used, by and large, exactly the way I envisioned” — Ray Tomlinson

Fraud, terms of service and email marketing
65.0.0.0/8 DNS issues

Related Posts

2016 Mary Litynski Award

The Mary Litynski Award is presented by M3AAWG to people who have done extensive work outside the public eye over a significant period of time. At the Dublin conference the award was presented to Rodney Joffe. A lot of other people will talk about Rodney’s accomplishments, including his role in the founding of Genuity, his work with the DMA in the early days of spam, his efforts against SMS spam and his efforts to secure the Internet infrastructure. But I have a much more personal perspective.
Rodney was seminal in changing my life and career path. Back in 1999, Rodney asked Steve to look into some DNS creativity he was testing. A few months later, Rodney invited Steve to join a new company he was founding based on that DNS creativity. We moved out the the Bay area and Steve started working for UltraDNS in early 2000.
Moving out to the Bay Area triggered my career shift into anti-spam and anti-abuse. I started working at MAPS (now Trend Micro) in their experimental consulting service division. We were the “carrot” end of the equation, where our job was to help companies minimize the abuse coming out of their networks.
After MAPS went through a round of layoffs in 2001, Rodney started recommending me as an email consultant to some of his connections in the marketing world. This work was a success and directly led to the founding of Word to the Wise and everything that flows from that.
M3AAWG has published a video where Rodney discusses his role in the history of spam and some of the other things he’s done to fight junk advertising (both fax and SMS spam). He sued junk faxers in small claims court. He was instrumental in getting SMS spam covered under the TCPA. He wrote the first global opt-out list supported by both the DMA and the ISPs and proved that global opt-out would never work. He literally pulled the plug on spamming customers.
Rodney says he’s “Not smart, just the guy who carries the bags of money and helps the smart people get things done.” I certainly don’t believe that is true. He has done things on the global scale to make the Internet a safer place for end users. But my appreciation is much more personal. I will forever be grateful to him for starting us on this path and the help and advice he gave us so many years ago.

Read More

The 500 mile email

This is a great story from Trey Harris about a real email delivery issue from the mid 1990s.
Here’s a problem that sounded impossible…  I almost regret posting the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a conference. 🙂  The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining.
I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.
“We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.”
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained.
I choked on my latte.  “Come again?”
“We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here,” he repeated.  “A little bit more, actually.  Call it 520 miles.  But no farther.”
“Um… Email really doesn’t work that way, generally,” I said, trying to keep panic out of my voice.  One doesn’t display panic when speaking to a department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department like statistics.  “What makes you think you can’t send mail more than 500 miles?”
“It’s not what I think,” the chairman replied testily.  “You see, when we first noticed this happening, a few days ago–”
“You waited a few DAYS?” I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice.  “And you couldn’t send email this whole time?”
“We could send email.  Just not more than–”
“–500 miles, yes,” I finished for him, “I got that.  But why didn’t you call earlier?”
“Well, we hadn’t collected enough data to be sure of what was going on until just now.”  Right.  This is the chairman of *statistics*. “Anyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it–”
“Geostatisticians…”
“–yes, and she’s produced a map showing the radius within which we can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles.  There are a number of destinations within that radius that we can’t reach, either, or reach sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius.”
“I see,” I said, and put my head in my hands.  “When did this start?  A few days ago, you said, but did anything change in your systems at that time?”
“Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it. But I called him, and he said he didn’t touch the mail system.”
“Okay, let me take a look, and I’ll call you back,” I said, scarcely believing that I was playing along.  It wasn’t April Fool’s Day.  I tried to remember if someone owed me a practical joke.
I logged into their department’s server, and sent a few test mails.  This was in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, and a test mail to my own account was delivered without a hitch.  Ditto for one sent to Richmond, and Atlanta, and Washington.  Another to Princeton (400 miles) worked.
But then I tried to send an email to Memphis (600 miles).  It failed. Boston, failed.  Detroit, failed.  I got out my address book and started trying to narrow this down.  New York (420 miles) worked, but Providence
(580 miles) failed.
I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my sanity.  I tried emailing a friend who lived in North Carolina, but whose ISP was in Seattle. Thankfully, it failed.  If the problem had had to do with the geography of the human recipient and not his mail server, I think I would have broken down in tears.
Having established that–unbelievably–the problem as reported was true, and repeatable, I took a look at the sendmail.cf file.  It looked fairly normal.  In fact, it looked familiar.
I diffed it against the sendmail.cf in my home directory.  It hadn’t been altered–it was a sendmail.cf I had written.  And I was fairly certain I hadn’t enabled the “FAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES” option.  At a loss, I telnetted into the SMTP port.  The server happily responded with a SunOS sendmail banner.
Wait a minute… a SunOS sendmail banner?  At the time, Sun was still shipping Sendmail 5 with its operating system, even though Sendmail 8 was fairly mature.  Being a good system administrator, I had standardized on Sendmail 8.  And also being a good system administrator, I had written a sendmail.cf that used the nice long self-documenting option and variable names available in Sendmail 8 rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark codes that had been used in Sendmail 5.
The pieces fell into place, all at once, and I again choked on the dregs of my now-cold latte.  When the consultant had “patched the server,” he had apparently upgraded the version of SunOS, and in so doing downgraded Sendmail.  The upgrade helpfully left the sendmail.cf alone, even though it was now the wrong version.
It so happens that Sendmail 5–at least, the version that Sun shipped, which had some tweaks–could deal with the Sendmail 8 sendmail.cf, as most of the rules had at that point remained unaltered.  But the new long configuration options–those it saw as junk, and skipped.  And the sendmail binary had no defaults compiled in for most of these, so, finding no suitable settings in the sendmail.cf file, they were set to zero.
One of the settings that was set to zero was the timeout to connect to the remote SMTP server.  Some experimentation established that on this particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.
An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100% switched.  An outgoing packet wouldn’t incur a router delay until hitting the POP and reaching a router on the far side.  So time to connect to a lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by incidental router delays.
Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell:

Read More

Who didn't invent email?

Who didn’t invent email? Shiva Ayyadurai.
He’s not the only one – I didn’t invent email either, nor did Abraham Lincoln, Boadicea or Tim Berners-Lee. So why mention Shiva?
He claims that in 1978 when he was 14, he took some courses in programming. His mum worked for the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and one of her colleagues challenged him to write an electronic mail system. And he did just that, creating a basic messaging system in FORTRAN, based on the existing paper memo format, ending up with a non-networked electronic mail system with similar functionality to mainstream applications that were in use well over a decade earlier.
That’s pretty impressive, and is the sort of thing that’ll look good on a college application form. (When I was 13 I designed and implemented a chassis dynamometer management unit that Shell’s research division used to test fuel and lube oil performance over virtual driving tracks – dozens of pages of 6502 assembly code, and you can be sure I put that on my college application form).
Some years later, in 1982, Shiva applied for and was granted a certificate of copyright registration on that piece of software. A copyright is not a patent – it recognizes and protects the expression of the work, not the idea underlying the work. There’s no real bar for copyright, other than it being a piece of work you created yourself – I automatically own copyright to anything I create, including software I’ve written and this blog post. Registering a copyright on a work, whether it be software or anything else, is a trivial exercise in bureaucracy – you fill in a form, you pay a registration fee, it gets rubber stamped. What is protected by the copyright is the work – in this case the software source code – itself, not the ideas, not the name of the package, nothing else. (I have copyright on my software package, Abacus. That doesn’t mean that I invented the Abacus.)
Meanwhile, Shiva moved into email marketing, founded a small ESP, and seems to be doing quite nicely (although a journalist who looked can’t find much evidence of the ESP being successful, or even existing, other than a lawsuit it filed against IBM and American Express for misappropriation of trade secrets in 2005).
Back in 2011, though, things started to get weird. Shiva started to use this copyright filing, and the fact that he used the title “EMAIL” on the filing, to support a claim that he was “the inventor of email”. It’s a compelling human interest / tech story to journalists whose knowledge of email and internet history is vague, so it got quite a bit of coverage.
(Shiva makes an image of his copyright certificate available: http://www.vashiva.com/images/vashiva_patent3_enl.jpg. Note that the URL describes it as a “patent”, rather than a copyright filing.)
It was quickly debunked. It didn’t pass the sniff test. Technical blogs started asking how the Washington Post and other press had fallen for this. The Washington Post clarified that pretty much all the significant claims in the original article were untrue.
It didn’t go away, though. Two-and-a-half years later, there’s a series of articles in the Huffington Post, pitching the same story, this time with a few unpleasant twists in it’s approach. It’s got a glossy infographic, filled with provably false claims. It has the feel of a professional PR campaign, rather than an article written by a reporter. Sure enough, it’s written by Larry Weber, a high powered PR guy (CEO of RacepointGlobal – who “build the right influencer relationships for your brand” – and CEO of Weber Public Relations Worldwide). There are at least five article in the series, all written by different people, but having oddly similar phrasing.
Shiva’s ESP, EchoMail, and their current branding is based around his (false) claim to be the “Inventor of Email”, so there’s clearly money as well as ego at stake. Neither Larry Weber nor the Huffington Post mentioned that Larry Weber is also on the board of EchoMail.
So we’re going through the debunking process again. I was going to write more, but others are way ahead of me.
 

Read More