There always seem to be someone talking about trying to eliminate email from our lives, but in reality, it’s nearly impossible to imagine what we would do without email. Email is indeed a business critical application – and for many a personal one too – and many of us can’t remember what life was like when email didn’t exist – at least for those that pre-date email. So when did email begin to exist?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the world’s first email was sent—but it had to start somewhere, right? In 1971, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), emerged as the first large network of computers and would later lead to the development of the Internet itself. As part of this networking venture, at first scientists first began thinking of ways to deliver messages to printers at remote locations, although the protocol was never implemented.
It wasn’t until Ray Tomlinson, who worked in engineering at BBN Technologies, came along and led the effort to develop an experimental file transfer program called “CPYNET,” which would ultimately lead to the first email transmission. CPYNET could write and read files on a remote computer, and Tomlinson then thought to have CPYNET append to files instead of replacing them and merged its functionality with SENDMSG, a program that can deliver messages to another person on the same computer. It was then that we could send messages to remote machines, and the first email program took flight.
In the early 1980s, email relaying was also being used with the simple UUCP technology at the University of California at Berkeley. Eric Allman (now CSO of Sendmail) later created a program called delivermail to combine multiple email transport services, creating a switch instead of an integrated email store-and-forward capability. Allman built on this experience to create the Sendmail program, which was distributed with BSD Unix, and has become the most commonly used SMTP server on the Internet.
We’ve come a long way since the first email program was born, and we’re still a long way from perfecting it in its role as a modern-day mission-critical application. With issues such as privacy, viruses, and scams, the challenges have continued to evolve just as the functionality has over time. As a leading provider of message processing appliances and applications for enterprise messaging infrastructures, Sendmail is proud to help improve the quality of email that we use today.
Source:
http://email.about.com/cs/emailhistory/a/first_email.htm
http://www.livinginternet.com/e/ei.htm