Email Account – An Account of the Email System

The origins of the email account that we all use and abuse today goes back to 1961 when MIT first demonstrated their Compatible Time Sharing System, the forerunner of today's mainframe server. It allowed multiple users to log in to their IBM 7094 computer and access as well as store files from multiple terminals. This wondrous new technology further encouraged students and faculty to share information and in 1965 electronic mail or email began as a way for those using the system to communicate with each other.

Off the Campus and On to the Internet

The first email systems were tied to a specific corporate or university mainframe and although they allowed thousands of people access to them, they had to be logged into the host system. By 1966 it was becoming possible for companies and universities to communicate in this manner providing they were both running similar operating systems. The most common system in use was the UNIX system, however there were many more being used at the time.

By the 80s as networked personal computers and corporate LANs became an increasingly important part of society and the business world the need for faster easy to use email became obvious. It was solved at the time by creating a similar system to the internal email server, but on a much bigger scale. Large email servers were set up that allowed thousands of users to communicate with each other as long as they all logged into the same system. Systems included Microsoft Mail, WordPerfect Office and Lotus Notes among others.

The Modern Email Account

Today you have a multitude of choices when it comes to selecting the type of email account you want to use for your business or personal email. With the advent of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and the mail transfer agent or MTA it is possible to have an email address with practically any destination address as the system is designed to interpret it and route it to the appropriate domain for delivery to your email box.

There are still many places where you can pay for your email account and in most cases you get a little more for your money than you would with the free services available. Often for a set fee per month you will a set number of email accounts with preset storage limits and certain other functions. However, in recent months the various email providers have been at war with each other trying to attract more customers by providing extras that the others do not offer. The first company to offer free unlimited storage is Yahoo.

In most families the first address many children learn these days is their email account address as almost everyone seems to have at least one. This has become the perfect opportunity for the business world to take advantage of an innovation and use it to reach out to millions of potential customers with emails that include letters and sales flyers. It has also led to a new phrase being coined, "spam mail" is used to describe the deluge of unsolicited email the invariably ends up in almost every email box no matter how hard you try to prevent it. With this in mind remember to protect your privacy and your computer by never opening an email that comes from a sender you do not recognize and never open an unexpected attachment.