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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We joined the i2Coalition

Word to the Wise has joined the i2Coalition. Today they posted our introduction to their blog.
Why did we do it?
Email, and online spaces, are so important to modern life. We shop, bank, communicate, play and interact online. The internet has facilitated everything from political revolution to coffee dates and international friendships. Steve watched the Berlin Wall fall from his college dorm room over the internet. The internet was a major factor in the organization of the Arab Spring and other political movements. And sometimes we just meet people online. BBSes, usenet, email, and social networks let us connect with each other.
With that being said, too many people see online spaces as nebulous and “not real.” But the reality is that people genuinely connect, organize, and participate in online spaces. Those spaces need to be protected so these things can continue. The internet is, in many ways, a very special and unique place that has facilitated the growth of millions of communities. Unless we protect the infrastructure, these communities will fall apart and be useless.

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Things to read: March 9, 2016

It’s sometimes hard for me to keep up with what other people are saying and discussing about email marketing. I’ve been trying to be more active on LinkedIn, but there are just so many good marketing and delivery blogs out there I can’t keep up with all of them.
talkingforblog
Here are a couple interesting things I’ve read in the last week.
Five Steps to Stay Out of the Spam Folder. Conceptually easy, sometimes hard to pull off in practice, these recommendations mirror many things I say here and tell my clients about delivery. The audience is in charge and your recipients are the best ally you can have when it comes to getting into the inbox.
Which states are the biggest sources of spam?. California and New York top the list, but the next two states are a little surprising. Over on Spamresource, Al points out the two next states have some unique laws that may affect the data. I just remember back in the day there were a lot of spammers in Michigan, I’m surprised there’s still a significant volume from there.
CASL didn’t destroy Canadian email. Despite concerns that CASL would destroy the Canadian email marketing industry, the industry is going strong and expanding. In fact, spending on email marketing in Canada was up more than 14% in 2015 and is on track to be up another 10% this year. Additionally, according to eMarketer lists are performing better because they’re cleaner.
A brief history of email. Part of the Guardian’s tribute to Ray Tomlinson, the person who sent the first email. Ray’s work literally changed lives. I know my life would be significantly different if there wasn’t email. Can you imagine trying to be a deliverability consultant without email? 🙂

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The Physics of the Email Universe

We talk a lot about rules and best practices in email, but we’re mostly talking about “squishy” rules-of-thumb that are based on simplified models of how mail systems, spam filters, recipients, postmasters and blacklist operators behave. They’re the biology, ecology and sociology of the email ecosystem.
There’s another set of rules we tend to only mention in passing, if at all, though. They’re the steely, sharp-edged laws that control the email universe. They’re the RFCs that define how email works and make sure that mail systems written by hundreds of different people across the globe all work and all interoperate with each other.
Building a message from Zeros and Ones
RFC 5322 – Internet Message Format
This tells you everything you need to know about crafting a simple email, with a subject line, a sender, some recipients and a simple plain-text message. It’s also the foundation of all fancier emails. If you’re creating emails, this is where to start.
A little more than plain ASCII
RFC 2047 – MIME Part 3: Message Header Extensions for Non-ASCII Text
RFC 2047 is one small part of the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) suite of protocols that allow you to include pictures and attachments and prettily formatted text and comic sans in your email. This part defines how you can put things other than the plainest of plain text in your subject lines or in the “friendly from” of your message. It’s what allows you to put Hiragana, or Cyrillic, or umlauts, or cedillas, or properly matched double quotes in your subject line. It also let’s you put hearts or smiley faces or other little pictograms there – but nothing this useful is going to be perfect.
RFC 2045 – MIME Part 1: Format of Internet Message Bodies
This shows how to send an image, or a plain text mail in a different character set, or an HTML mail. It doesn’t tell you how to send plain text and HTML, or to send HTML with embedded images, or a message with an attached document. For that you need…
Finally, Modern Email
RFC 2046 – MIME Part 2: Media Types
This builds on RFC 2045 to allow you to have many different chunks in a message – this is what you need if you want to send “proper” HTML mail with a plain text alternative, or if you want embedded images or attachments.
Getting From A To B
RFC 5321 – Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
A message isn’t much use unless you send it somewhere. RFC 5321 explains the mysteries of actually sending that message over the wire to the recipient. If you need to know about the different phases of a message delivery, what “4xx” and “5xx” actually mean, why there’s not really any such thing as a hard or soft bounce defined, just temporary or permanent failures, or anything else about actually sending mail or diagnosing mail delivery, this is your starting point.
The Rest Of The Iceberg
I’ve only touched on the very smallest tip of the email iceberg here. There’s much, much more – both in RFCs and ad-hoc non-RFC standards. If you’re interested in more, this is a decent place to start.

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