deja vu

[cellio]

In the early days, email was unreliable and slow. We had to route messages by hand, and each machine in the network might process its UUCP queue only once or twice a day. It could take days for a message to get to its recipient, and sometimes it didn't get there at all.

Then, the ARPANet became dominant and email was faster and more reliable. Most people using it were "practicioners" of various sorts; the average guy on the street didn't yet have email.

Then two things happened: spam, and widespread email access (making spam even more profitable). Now, almost 10 years after the green-card lawyers created the first piece of spam and AOL sent out its first mass (physical) mailing of software, we're all swimming in spam, and virii, and lures (for the unsuspecting) to "just click here", and the attendant side effects. So we have filters and auto-processing of various sorts, and this month most of us aren't inspecting bounced-message reports because of all the SoBig-generated false ones, so we don't even know if we're seeing all our mail or if the mail we send gets through. Sometimes we have to send messages several times, or actually tell someone "I sent you email", before the recipient actually sees it.

25 years after the rise of UUCP, email is unreliable and slow again. Oops.

Comments

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

'Most people using it were "practicioners" of various sorts; the average guy on the street didn't yet have email.'

I apologize in advance, this is going to come out snarky to some folks no matter how I say it.

Most folks had a .edu account. And then when Compuserve et al started up, the academics grumbled that the bar had been lowered and now just anybody without any sort of technical background could communicate over long distances to everybody without racking up a huge phone bill to which all the ham radio operators I know were saying "That's what *we* said about Usenet!" :D

nit

[cellio]

Actually, back in the heyday of UUCP, nobody had .edu addresses. They hadn't been invented yet. :-)

...{seismo|rutgers}!cmu-cs-g!mjc

Re: nit

[gregbo.livejournal.com]

Even if domain names had (officially) been in existence back then, there still would have been a lot of people with .com, especially all the people who worked at Bell Labs and the other AT&T/Bellcore/etc sites.