COM 125 Assignment 1 Email

The invention of the Internet was something that has changed the history of our society. The Internet is not only a way for you to get your sports scores, your weather, or your current events. It is also a communication gatekeeper, that helps individuals connect with friends, family, co workers, or even complete strangers. Email is a huge reason why people are able to communicate with anyone all over the world with a simple click of the mouse....

E-mail or Electronic mail was first used even before the Internet was invented. In fact before the Internet email was used as a file directory. The message would be stored on the computer so the next time the person logged on they would see the message.. (Like leaving a note on a co-workers desk). The first type of this file directory was Mailbox which was used at MIT in the 1960's.

Without the Internet the only people that you could send messages to were people who were also using the same computer. Therefore, it was rarely used.In 1972 Ray Tomlinson was the man given credit for creating email. In his efforts of creating email, Tom knew he needed a way to create a virtual postal system so the mail could flow to the correct recipient. He understood for this to work each individual using the Internet would need there own address. Tom decided to use the @ symbol to denote a message being sent from one user to another. (name-of-user@name-of -computer) (Wiki)Email is the most popular function of the Internet and is used by 600 million people worldwide.

Everyone remembers when Internet was first developed there was no broadband connection. Every time a person went onto the Internet they would have to use a dial-up connection and it would go straight to a persons phone bill. Therefore people shied away from using email, because they didn't want to pay to read or write there own mail. That is until the invention of offline readers. This program allowed a person to sign on to the Internet and save all of there email to there computers hard drive, and therefore read it later. It also let you compose a message and save it for the next time you went on the Internet. This kept peoples phone bills down and peoples email attraction up.

As email began to get more popular the Post Office Protocol or POP was created. It allowed people to create mail systems that would work with anyone.

A huge flaw of email is the idea of forgery. Anyone can sign up and create an email address. They can pretend to be anyone and their is really no way of knowing if the person is who they claim to be. There has been suggestions of a more difficult way to subscribe to an email address to prevent this forgery but that is something that will probably never happen.

They're so many email providers to use for example google, yahoo, hotmail, aol, etc. And each site has there own unique options that enhance the subscribers experience. If one thing is certain, email will be around for a very long time and without it our Internet experience would be a lot different.