COM125 Week 2: History of the Internet

You’ve Got Mail! Electronic Mail, or as we know it, Email, was invented 1965. It all started with the invention of the computer. When Douglas Engelbart was driving to work one day in 1950, he thought about the computer to help manage the complex new world created by technology. Little did he know that the Internet would not only develop but would change the history and course of communication. As seen in the reading, (Rheingold, 1993) Net is not the only means of communication. Even if it is shut down, people can still communicate via the email and exchange thoughts.

Even though email was often called the killer application of the Internet (2006, August 20), it predates it and was a crucial tool in creating the Internet. Email started of as a way for multiple users of a time- sharing mainframe computer to communicate. The first systems to have this facility were the SDC’c Q32 and MIT’s CTSS. The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the evolution of email and in 1971, Roy Tomlinson created the standard Internet email address format using the @ sign to separate user names from host names. This led to the development of a number of protocols, which delivered emails among groups of time sharing computers over alternative transmission systems, such as UUCP and IBM’s VNET email system. This way emails could be passed between a number of networks including ARPANET, BITNET, NSFNet and hosts connected directly to other sites via UUCP. Just like the web, the email operates over the Internet (2006, September 5) and is a medium for CMC (2006, August 20) or Computer Mediated Communication. CMC is a representation of a human communication medium and the transformation of many- to- many communications on the Net will continue to dominate just as it is in the present.

Email is an advanced method of composing, sending and receiving messages over electronic communication systems. The term email applies to the Internet email system based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and to the intranet systems, which allow the users within one organization to email each other using the internal email service. Once the Internet and email systems were developed, by 1966, email quickly extended to become network email, allowing users to pass messages between different computers. This is very similar to what we use today, the only difference is that, ours is a more elaborate network.

The format of the Internet email messages is defined in RFC 2822 and a series of RFC’s, RFC 2045 through RFC 2049 collectively called Multipurpose Mail Extension (MIME) (Email, Wikipedia). In simpler terms, the email messages consist of two major sections: Header and Body. The Header composes of the summary, sender, receiver and other information about the email. It consists of fields including; From, To, Subject and Date. It also includes other headings like Cc, Bcc, Received and content type. On the other hand, the Body is made up of unstructured text, which may or may not have a signature block at the end. The header is separated from the body by a blank line.

The present situation of emails also includes the negative points of email. As we all know, the usefulness of e-mail is being threatened by three phenomena: spamming, phishing and e-mail worms. Spamming is unsolicited commercial e-mail. Caused by the very low cost of sending e-mails, spammers can send hundreds of millions of e-mail messages each day over an inexpensive Internet connection. Hundreds of active spammers sending this volume of mail results in information overload for many computer users who receive tens or even hundreds of junk messages each day. Another threat to the efficient email system is the E-mail worms. These use e-mail as a way of replicating themselves into vulnerable computers. Although the first e-mail worm affected UNIX computers, the problem is most common today on the more popular Microsoft Windows operating system (Email, Wikipedia). Thus, the combination of spam and worm programs results in users receiving a constant drizzle of junk e-mail, which reduces the usefulness of e-mail as a practical tool.

To counter the problem efficiently, a number of anti-spam techniques moderate the impact of spam. For example, in the United States, U.S. Congress has passed a law, the Can Spam Act of 2003, in order to regulate such e-mail. Australia also has very strict spam laws restricting spam. These are some measures taken by certain countries but with the increasing number of spam and worm messages, it is becoming a concern for all Internet users.

Apart from the threats to email there are certain issues regarding the privacy of e-mail. E-mail privacy, without some security precautions, can be compromised due to several reasons like; e-mail messages which are generally not encrypted; the messages have to go through intermediate computers before reaching their destination, meaning it is relatively easy for others to intercept and read messages; many Internet Service Providers (ISP) store copies of your e-mail messages on their mail servers before they are delivered. The backups of these can remain up to several months on their server, even if you delete them in your mailbox; the Received: headers and other information in the email can often identify the sender, preventing anonymous communication. To counter some of these problems, there are cryptography applications that can serve as a remedy to one or more of the above. For example, Virtual Private Networks can be used to encrypt traffic from the user machine to a safer network. Another risk is that e-mail passwords might be intercepted during sign-in. One may use encrypted authentication schemes such as SASL to help prevent this (Email, Wikipedia).

Therefore, in conclusion, my warning to the users is that they should be careful and should report spam, as well as refrain from disclosing their passwords and important passwords via the email.

Reference:
➢ Rheingold, H. (1993). Visionaries and Convergences: The Accidental History of the Net. The Virtual Community. New York: Perseus Books. Retrieved from http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/3.html
➢ History of the Internet. (2006, August 20). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17:07, August 23, 2006, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_Internet&oldid=70771572
➢ History of the World Wide Web. (2006, September 5). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:58, September 8, 2006, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_World_Wide_Web&oldid=73974490
➢ Email. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email