Email and my own working life have been closely intertwined. I started using email in 1983 and over the years I have used more than three dozen different systems and sent thousands of messages and probably deleted millions of questionable ones too. So I thought I would put together some important milestones of my own usage, mapped against some significant historical email developments and show you how email has changed from those early days.
For the first 15 or so years, email use in business was a rarity. Few companies had any external connectivity, which meant users had to connect via modems back to the main office. Now we take internet and Wifi for granted.
- 1983: Started using both MCIMail, one of the first global systems that was available to the public (the Internet was not yet available to the average worker) and a conferencing system called EIES. One job I had back then was to write automated scripts for processing messages between the two at a small software firm.
- 1984: At an insurance company, I used an IBM mainframe email product called DISOSS for internal communications.
- 1986: Used 3Com’s 3+Mail for internal communications at PC Week. This was one of the early LAN-based email programs. We thought we were hot stuff because we could hook up our remote offices around the country to it, something now taken for granted.
- 1987: Wrote my first column for PC Week about hotels, modems, and email. Today the problem still remains, just replace Wifi and VPNs for the modems.
- 1988: Managed my first remote team with editors reporting to me from California, Denver, Texas and other places. Email connectivity made this all possible.
- 1989: Covered the launch of Lotus Notes, one of the first collaborative software tools, and lobbied Ziff Davis, where I worked, to start using it in place of 3+. They eventually did a few years’ later. Compuserve and MCIMail begin offering Internet gateways to their users on an experimental basis.
- 1990: I started Network Computing magazine, where we routinely used Internet email addresses for our writers in their bylines. We used Network Courier LAN-based email, which was the precursor to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. This was also my first entry into Internet-based email: we were able to communicate with anyone using a gateway that was maintained by UCLA.
- 1991: Began to chart ways to send emails between two formerly disparate systems, using various gateways. The rise of Soft-Switch, which at its height could connect more than 50 different systems. They were eventually acquired by Lotus. Again, something taken for granted now. Also the year that Phil Zimmermann released PGP for email encryption. To get around US security laws, he soon published its source code as a printed book.
- 1992: I was one of the first wireless email users of a product called RadioMail, which
eventually became the BlackBerry. It worked with a one-pound radio and a one pound HP palmtop.
- 1993: Obtained my first Internet domain name, strom.com, for free from Network Solutions by requesting it from them via email. Before then, private businesses couldn’t really become masters of their own domains easily.
- 1994: Groupware was the big deal back then, and Novell’s Groupwise was one of the best. Too bad that it withered away, along with the rest of Novell. This was also the year that AOL began offering an Internet gateway so its users could communicate with each other. It was far from perfect: for example, the early Mac AOL clients couldn’t read attachments from Internet senders.
- 1995: Began the first of a series of weekly email newsletters called Web Informantusing a collection of Unix scripts. Still writing them, using a hosted Mailman server by Pair.
- 1996: Experimented with Intermind’s push technology for notifications instead of sending emails for my newsletter. Didn’t last very long. Push pooped out quickly.
- 1997: Gave up my laptop and used borrowed computers when traveling. That didn’t last very long either. Did have the very early smartphone from AT&T that used broadband (well, it wasn’t all that broad) cellular data called CDPD, the precursor to what we all use today on our phones. This was the year that Apple acquired NeXT and incorporated its email software into various Apple operating systems.
- 1998: This was an important year for me and was the year that I co-wrote my email
book with Marshall Rose, the inventor of the POP protocols. The book covered the more popular email programs at the time, which included Lotus cc:Mail (extinct), Netscape Messenger (extinct but replaced by Thunderbird you could say), Eudora Pro (still very much alive with this open source project), Compuserve (not extinct but should be), AOL (ditto), and Microsoft’s Outlook Express (which has gone through various evolutions and still exists with its Office/365 products). Penn Jillette, of Penn and Teller fame and an early email user, wrote our forward to our book. Out of that research is this Web page that I haven’t touched since then that shows the state of email encryption interoperability. Luckily, it has gotten better, sort of.
- 2001: Was a regular user of Lotus Notes, which by then had been purchased by IBM, while working back at CMP.
- 2002: Wrote about Michael Dell’s bandwidth separation anxiety here, probably one of the first of many popular instances of cutting off email.
- 2004: At the annual VIP economic forum love fest gathering in Davos, Bill Gates proclaimed: “Two years from now, spam will be solved.” Right. Not even close on that one Bill.
- 2005: Began using Mozilla’s ThunderBird as my regular email client. Here is a story about the trials then.
- 2006: Switched hosting my various email domains over to Google Apps. For free. Began using Gmail as my regular email client, although it wouldn’t talk IMAP for another year. Also the year that the concept of “email inbox zero” was introduced.
- 2008: Reminisced about ten years after my email book in my post here. Vint Cerf wrote this then too about ten years of using the Internet.
- 2009: First of many “email is dead” articles in WSJ and elsewhere analyzed here.
- 2011: The latest in a series of days without email proposed to make some obscure point.
- 2017: Better email authentication protocols (DKIM, SPF, DMARC) come into wider use. As I wrote about at the time, becoming master of your email domain is incredibly difficult to implement, still true to this day.
- 2018: IBM sells off Lotus Notes to an Indian conglomerate. That link will take you to why Notes was so significant in its heyday.
- 2019-2022: Helm is released, an interesting dedicated email server appliance. It closed its doors at the end of 2022, victim to supply chain issues and IMHO, a bad collection of features.
- 2022: Google begins charging me for my domain for the first time since I began using their email service.
- 2023: Yes, I still try to have less than ten messages at the end of each day in my inbox. Encrypted email remains for the most part ignored by the general public, even as phishing continues to rise. Some things never change.