COM 125 week 2:email

Nowadays, sending messages to a friend living far from us in just a minute is not impossible. Every day, people send billions of emails to each other. Even you yourself are sending out a dozen or more emails each day without even thinking about it. Obviously, email has become one of the most convenient ways to communicate.

Electronic mail (abbreviated "e-mail" or, often, "email") is a store and forward method of composing, sending, storing, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems (Wikipedia, 2007). Email is also called the killer application of computer. It predates the internet and was a crucial tool in creating it.

E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time- sharing mainframe computer to communicate.
Before internetworking began, therefore, email could only be used to send messages to various users of the same computer. Once computers began to talk to each other over networks, however, the problem became a little more complex - We needed to be able to put a message in an envelope and address it. To do this, we needed a means to indicate to whom letters should go that the electronic posties understood - just like the postal system, we needed a way to indicate an address.(Peter, 2004)

Email was quickly extended to become network emal, allowing users to pass messages between different computers.The ARPANET computer network made large contribution to the evolution of email.

According to Darwin Magazine: Prime Movers, the first e-mail message was sent in 1971 by an engineer named Ray Tomlinson. He was working on a small team developing the TENEX operating system, with local email programs called SNDMSG and READMAIL. Tomlinson's breakthrough was the ability to send messages to other machines on the Internet, using the @ sign to designate the receiving machine (Brain, 2000). The ARPANET significantly increased the popularity iif email, and it become the killer application of the ARPANET.

Alhtough the world wide web offers a lot of facility, email remains the most important application of the internet and was widely used. Today, more than 600million people use it internationally.

Larry Roberts invented some email folders for his boss so he could sort his mail. In 1975 John Vital developed some software to organize email. By 1976 email had really taken off, and commercial packages began to appear. Within a couple of years, 75% of all ARPANET traffic was email. (Peter, 2004)

For most people on the Internet in 1988, email and email discussion groups were the main uses. As a body of newsgroup they become known as USENET.

Email started to be made available by providers such as Yahoo or Hotmail and this was without charge. Everyone wanted at least one email address, and the medium eas not adopted by not just millions, but hundeds of millions of people.

From the time it’s composed to the time it’s read, email travels along unprotected Internet. More and more business are relying on email to correspond with clients and colleagues. As more important information is transferred online, the need for email privecy becomes more pressing. The protection of electronic mail from unauthorized access and inspection is known as e-mail privacy. (wikipedia, 2007)

Today, email is not served as a tool to send a message but also as media of ‘creativity’ for Internet users. For example, email spoofing.
E-mail spoofing is a term used to describe fraudulent email activity in which the sender address and other parts of the email header are altered to appear as though the email originated from a different source. E-mail spoofing is a technique commonly used for spam e-mail and phishing to hide the origin of an e-mail message. By changing certain properties of the e-mail, such as the From, Return-Path and Reply-To fields (which can be found in the message header), hackers can make the e-mail appear to be from someone other than the actual sender. It is often associated with website spoofing which mimic an actual, well-known website but are run by another party either with fraudulent intentions or as a means of criticism of the organisation's activities.(wikipedia, 2007)

Personally, I think email has change the way we communicate. We are no longer need to go to post office and send a letter to the other party without knowing whether the letter has arrived or not. Email is faster and easy to use and also free of charge for everybody.

References:
Brain, Marshall.(01 April 2000). "How Email Works". Retrieved 27 Jan. 2007 from<http://computer.howstuffworks.com/email.htm>

Email.(24 January 2007). In WIkipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 27 Jan. 2007 from<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email>

Email Spoofing .(14 January 2007). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 27 Jan. 2007 from< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spoofing>

Peter, Ian.(2004). "The History of Email". Net History. Retrieved 27 Jan. 2007 from<http://www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20the%20Internet/email.html>