IBM, CompuServe and Xerox used in-house mail systems in the 1970s CompuServe sold a commercial intraoffice mail product from 1978 and IBM and Xerox from 1981. Proprietary electronic mail systems soon began to emerge. Over a series of RFCs, conventions were refined for sending mail messages over the File Transfer Protocol. In 1971 the first ARPANET network mail was sent, introducing the now-familiar address syntax with the symbol designating the user’s system address. Most developers of early mainframes and minicomputers developed similar, but generally incompatible, mail applications. The conventions for fields within emails-the “To,” “From,” “CC,” “BCC” etc.-began with RFC-680 in 1975.Īn Internet email consists of an envelope and content the content consists of a header and a body.Ĭomputer-based messaging between users of the same system became possible after the advent of time-sharing in the early 1960s, with a notable implementation by MIT’s CTSS project in 1965. The service is often simply referred to as mail, and a single piece of electronic mail is called a message. The original usage in June 1979 occurred in the journal Electronics in reference to the United States Postal Service initiative called E-COM, which was developed in the late 1970s and operated in the early 1980s.ĮMAIL was used by CompuServe starting in April 1981, which popularized the term.ĮMail is a traditional form used in RFCs for the “Author’s Address”. This spelling also appears in most dictionaries.Į-mail is the form favored in edited published American English and British English writing as reflected in the Corpus of Contemporary American English data, but is falling out of favor in some style guides.Į-mail is sometimes used. It is the form required by IETF Requests for Comments (RFC) and working groups. The term electronic mail has been in use with its modern meaning since 1975, and variations of the shorter E-mail have been in use since 1979:Įmail is now the common form, and recommended by style guides. International email, with internationalized email addresses using UTF-8, is standardized but not widely adopted.įurther information: History of email § Terminology and usage Originally an ASCII text-only communications medium, Internet email was extended by Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) to carry text in other character sets and multimedia content attachments. Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously they need to connect, typically to a mail server or a webmail interface to send or receive messages or download it. Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages. Today’s email systems are based on a store-and-forward model. The term is a mass noun.Įmail operates across computer networks, primarily the Internet, and also local area networks. Email has become such a ubiquitous (very widely used) communication medium to the point that in current use, an email address is often treated as a basic and necessary part of many processes in business, commerce, government, education, entertainment, and other spheres of daily life in most countries.Įmail is the medium, and each message sent therewith is also called an email. Email was thus conceived as the electronic (digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when “mail” meant only physical mail (hence e- + mail). Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages (“mail”) between people using electronic devices.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |