24 years of email | Hacker News Reader

24 years of email

jgc.org

32 pointsjgrahamc17 comments

Heh, I'm so old I remember being on the first mailing list on the Internet back in 1972-73, which was (suitably meta) a mailing list about mail programs & related issues.

(It was based out of BBN, whence came the first email.)

The first mail servers were rather primitive: they were just (pre-TCP/IP) FTP-like servers that would open your local mailbox (on TOPS-10 in our case, at HARV-10) and append to it. Lots of interesting locking issues...

I'm not that old but I do remember the day when my college BITNET email address could finally gateway to the Internet. Seeing dots in the domain part of the address was weird.

> And most people's domains hadn't reached the point where just using initials was unworkable.

Seems like my first email address (especially university VAX accounts) back then were even more cryptic and included some bizarre Godzilla reference like djd984kd@mothra.someschool.edu.

The .mil domains were especially bad, you'd end up with monstrosities like:

col.so-on.and.so-forth@afc.dcmc4.west.army.mil

I think Gmail/Apple Mail's message threading system should be included. When I think about the pre-thread days of having to read 16 separate emails because 8 corporate douchebags all responded needlessly to the same original message, it makes me appreciate email threading even more.

Threading predates Gmail by a couple decades. RFC-822 (1982) specifies the necessary fields, and though I don't have personal experience prior to the early 90s, I'm sure decent MUAs supported threading in the 80s.

I actually find Gmail's threading annoying since it only threads at the level of the "conversation" (aka "subject"), even when the initial thread has split. So Gmail doesn't tell me which branch a particular message lives on, and if the reply does not quote enough context, you really can't find out without inspecting the raw message.

Furthermore, several messages that should be threaded together, such as a patch series, show up as unrelated messages in the UI because they have different subjects. So Gmail's threading UI does the "wrong" thing because people have a tendency to screw up headers, e.g. trying to start a new thread by replying to an existing one and changing the subject. I'm not sure this is progress.

Search isn't a general replacement for folders. If you're using folders to try and find things, then yes, search is better for finding than you doing classification yourself.

But filtering things into folders is very useful for other basic forms of categorization, such as by identity (if you have multiple email addresses), or by mailing list (mental context switching is hard) or by priority (I do mine by three categories - the actual inbox, which I empty regularly, emails that will need replies after something else has been done, and everything else).

A lot of categorization can actually be done by search though--identity and mailing list can be done by searching against the to: field.

I read my Usenet newsgroups and my mailing lists using the same software, with threaded conversations in multiple branches etc. handled in uniform fashion.

The same style for email conversations (in the GMail grouping sense) works less well because, as it turns out, the heuristic of using the title for thread membership works quite well for mailing lists but not so for personal mail, where "Hello" and similar variations come up too often.

The identity issue is less about functionality than it is about the risk of accidentally using the wrong persona. Not that I'm trying to be schizophrenic, but I do have a degree of compartmentalization in different areas of my online life.

What about attachments? AFAIK attachments weren't part of the initial implementation of email.

Today though, emailing attachments to small groups is mainstream. This is what many people use as THE form of controlled document distribution and collaboration.

Will improving this aspect of email be the next evolution?

Attachments are part of MIME.

> That's one major innovation every 8 years

I wonder if this is a pattern across technologies.

No. Just look at the major innovations on the web and you'll see it doesn't follow that pattern. Search Engines, Google, Web based email, Web based Applications, AJAX, Rebirth of Javascript, Horizontal Scaling, Tagging, Folksonomy, Wikipedia, Twitter, Blogging, all major innovations and some have occurred in less than 8 years of each other. Frequency of major innovations are fueled by how many people are working on it. Rates of innovation can be a measure of how hot a technology is. Every 8 years indicates a much cooler technology than say the web.

> I don't think the little > is cutting it anymore.

Edit: Read the article before you respond.

It is only not cutting it because people don't use it.

I have yet to run across anything better for keeping complex conversations going. (And nothing I'm experiencing in email today is as hard to keep track of as an active Usenet group 15 years ago.)

>> I don't think the little > is cutting it anymore.

Of course it is, coderdude!

EDIT: too subtle?

I think it was just too early (in the morning). :)

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