Electronic Mail Security

History Of E-Mail

Electronic mail began as a simple messaging scheme in the first time – Compatible Time sharing systems (CTSS) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS at Dartmouth) in the 1960s. A message sender would use a very simple interface to place the message in a file accessible by another user. The user could then read the messages directly from the file. It was not until after key elements of the Arpanet were created at Bolt, Beraneck, and Newman (BBN) in 1969 that e-mail messages were sent between computers. This seminal event took place in 1971 following an experiment by Ray Tomlinson in a BBN lab (Raiston, Burke, Nakayoma & Tolani, 2004, Turner & Housley 2008). This simple experiment began an explosion that soon dominated the use of the Arpanet and its successor, the Internet. By 1973, three quarter of all traffic on the Arpanet was e-mail and Ray Tomlinson had gained both fame and notoriety as the inventor of today’s standard at sign @-base e-mail address. According to Raiston, Burke, Nakayama and Tolani (2004) “The notoriety was due to early systems such as Tenex which had difficulty with the @” (299 p), other early net works such as UCPnet and Bitnet quickly adopted the system.