Brief History:
According to Ian Peter, author of “The history of email” on NetHistory, the first important email standard was called SMTP, or simple message transfer protocol. SMTP was very simple and is still in use - however, SMTP was a fairly naïve protocol, and made no attempt to find out whether the person claiming to send a message was the person they purported to be. Forgery was (and still is) very easy in email addresses. These basic flaws in the protocol were later to be exploited by viruses and worms, and by security frauds and spammers forging identities. Some of these problems are still being addressed in 2004.
But as it developed email started to take on some pretty neat features. One of the first good commercial systems was Eudora, developed by Steve Dorner in 1988. Not long after Pegasus mail appeared.
When Internet standards for email began to mature the POP (or Post Office Protocol) servers began to appear as a standard - before that each server was a little different. POP was an important standard to allow users to develop mail systems that would work with each other.
These were the days of per-minute charges for email for individual dialup users. For most people on the Internet in those days email and email discussion groups were the main uses. These were many hundreds of these on a wide variety of topics, and as a body of newsgroups they became known as USENET.
With the World Wide Web, email started to be made available with friendly web interfaces by providers such as Yahoo and Hotmail. Usually this was without charge. Now that email was affordable, everyone wanted at least one email address, and the medium was adopted by not just millions, but hundreds of millions of people (Peter, 2004).
What Direction is Email headed in the future?:
According to Erica Driver, principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Boston, "The discussion is no longer about just email; it's an entire collaboration platform." Vendors such as Microsoft and IBM have put together communication suites that include not just email, but instant messaging, social networking and collaboration tools as well.
In fact, Email has become a staple for communication, and a still highly ranked reason for even getting online. The very act of emailing has penetrated nearly every aspect of our lives, and is quite central to most of our online activity, across social media-sharing sites, notifications, event-planning and tracking appointments.
This brings us to the point in the discussion where we highlight the efforts and positive contributions Zenbe is having for IMC practitioners. Zenbe is a new free webmail service, aiming to deliver the best email experience on the web. Zenbe has now teamed up with Twitter. Twitter is a free service that lets you keep in touch with people using the web, your phone, or IM.
According to Paul Glazowski, “The ability for users to now instant message one another and correspond with friends and followers through Twitter from within the Zenbe environment is a big convenience, and with no advertisements to speak of, Zenbe seems to provide one of the best webmail experiences of any data aggregator of its kind.” IMC practitioners now have the opportunity to send a variety of “opt-in” messages through an interactive platform which takes full advantage of wireless technology and mobile marketing techniques. Just take a quick peak of recent videos created by Zenbe and Twitter.
Once again, thanks for joining me this week and as always, I welcome your feedback or comments. Please feel free to visit me online at http://segment-specific-media.blogspot.com/
~ Dan
References:
Peter, I. (2004). The history of email – NetHistory retrieved June 28, 2008 from http://www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20the%20Internet/email.html
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