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Written by Ron Porter
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Tuesday, 12 February 2008 |
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Word Count: 516 E-mail 101
E-mail, or electronic mail, was one of the first social mediums available to
visitors in cyber space. Developed by Ray Tomlinson in 1971, e-mail originally
allowed users to only post mail messages to individual accounts across a single
network. The supporting software was quickly circulated among the computer sites
on ARPANET, a pre-Internet version of the World Wide Web that was used to
connect a network of defense department computers. By 1972, e-mail was the most
widely used application on the ARPANET network. Ever since, e-mail has been the
most powerful and popular of all social computing software.
By the year 1999, the heyday of the Internet, over 610 billion e-mails were sent
worldwide. E-mail can be read and sent from a network computer, across even the
very slowest of modem connected web links. It is so basic to modern computing
that, for almost all Internet users, it is the first thing they check when they
log on to their computer. E-mail has been widely credited with fueling the surge
in Internet usage as many people have sought online access first as a way to
access electronic communications with friends, family and colleagues. According
to statistics gathered in a study conducted by the University of California in
Los Angeles, well over 80 percent of Internet users utilize e-mail at least once
a day.
Despite the enduring popularity of e-mail, there have been relatively few
attempts to create a map that tracks the structure and content of e-mail.
Interfaces for e-mail clients are much the same today as they were a decade ago.
Appropriately for a predominantly text-based form of communication, messages are
stored in sorted lists and arranged in folders. And yet there is an ever
increasing need for better and more efficient tools to manage the seemingly
unlimited growth in the volume and importance of e-mails that many people
receive on a daily basis.
The power of e-mail for one-to-one communication can easily be used for
one-to-many interactions, as well as many-to-many conversations. This is
achieved via the use of mailing lists, list servers, and bulletin boards. A
mailing list is a one-to-many communication medium where the list owner can send
a single message to every member on a list. A message can therefore be delivered
to hundreds of subscribers with no extra effort.
A list server extends this concept to allow many-to-many conversations by
permitting all subscribers to post messages to everyone on this list. This
allows for ongoing discussions involving many participants. Bulletin boards,
similarly, allow many-to-many communications between individuals. However,
unlike mailing lists, messages are not redistributed to subscribers; instead,
messages are posted to a central site, usually web-based, which users have to
log on to in order to receive their messages.
Here, Ron E. Porter says here about the history of Email or Electronic mails and how it can serve as an objective for Web Traffic Monetization. For more information on Search Engine Optimization, Software Engineering Outsource, Web Traffic Monetization, Web Content Creation, Link Building services, please visit www.castlewave.com.
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