Friday 17 September 2010

Email

Email


Electronic communication is commonly known as email. An email is an electronic message sent through the internet. Most emails can trace the sender by the headers of the message. You can block any sender or spam any emails. You can attach files such as images and videos to email too. According to Darwin magazine the first email was sent in 1971.


"Email servers are probably about the most complicated servers to set up because not only is there a huge number of security implications to running your own mail server but they also tend to be split up into many small parts taht all do different, highly specialized, things" http://www.crazysquirrel.com/computing/debian/mail.jspx (this website is not one of the most promising websites and the spelling is quite bad however the basic information written is good)


Here is a basic time line of the history of email.



1971: Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer working for Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, developed a system for sending messages between computers that used the @ symbol to identify addresses. He now can't remember the first message he sent, or the exact date he sent it.
Tomlinson's system gained popularity by linking up users on Arpanet, the US department of defence system that became the basis for the internet.
1972: Larry Roberts - also at work on Arpanet - writes the first email management program that develops the ability to list, select, forward, and respond to messages.
1976: Queen Elizabeth II sends an email message on Arpanet, becoming the first head of state to do so.
1988: Steve Dorner invents Eudora, an application that gave a popular face to email by providing a graphical user interface for email management.
1989: The first release of Lotus Notes email software. 35,000 copies are sold in the first year.
1996: Microsoft releases Internet Mail and News 1.0, a feature of its third release of Internet Explorer. This is later renamed Outlook.
1996: A few companies - including the fledgling Hotmail - begin to offer free, use-anywhere, internet email.
1997: About 10 million users world wide have free web mail accounts.
1998: Microsoft buys Hotmail for $400m (£283m).
2001: Email celebrates its 30th anniversary with virtually every business in the developed world signed on

Mini email fact file:

247 billion messages per day means more than 2.8 million emails are sent every second. Around 80% of these millions of message are but spam and viruses.


Websites used:
http://communication.howstuffworks.com/email.htm
http://www.crazysquirrel.com/computing/debian/mail.jspx
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2002/mar/13/internetnews
http://email.about.com/od/emailtrivia/f/emails_per_day.htm
http://www.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&q=emails&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&biw=1280&bih=699

1 comment:

  1. Fair comments. Feel free to expand on the technical issues (email servers and email clients) and give an overview of what happens when an email is sent/recieved. The time line is a nice touch. Could this be linked to an indication of the number of emails being spent i.e the growth of emai lduring the same period. THe total number of emails being set currently is staggering but this needs verifying as does the number of spam. Is this recoded or (more likely) extrapolated? Finally try to be more specific in the description of advantages and disadvantages.

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