By Jeff Webb October 15, 2020 Tech

Regardless of where you host your email, it is very likely that you have undergone an issue or two previously. Maybe you’ve experienced bounces, delays or another problem. Such issues can be very frustrating! To totally comprehend why email could be debatable even if it’s working properly, it will help to have some basic background knowledge on the history and evolution of email, and how we ended up where we are today. To do this properly, we are going to start with viewing a few of the earliest mainframe computers in the late 1950’s.

Computation vs. Communication

Early computers had no messaging protocol, because computers were designed for computation not communication. While large mainframe computers had some type of messaging protocol from the late 1960’s, these computers weren’t interconnected whatsoever and nothing had been standardized. Subsequently ARPANET came along and began interconnecting universities and research labs. ARPANET was the US government’s research network, and all customers of the community were directly engaged in government work. The inventors of email were the investigators who wanted to progress from tasks such as leaving messages for each other interior of documents to addressing messages to each other just as you would with a paper envelope. It was not designed as far as it evolved. Let’s look at that development a bit more closely. The First Email Nowadays we take the @ symbol for granted, but it wasn’t always this way. Until that invention, it wasn’t possible to email other men and women who weren’t on exactly the same mainframe on your own. The very first thing sent with the @ symbol is widely regarded as the very first email sent. This occurred at a university in 1971, almost 50 years back. Researchers, the very users of email, kept adding functionality to it to make email more useful. The very first email programs were constructed on top of current tools. The programs could only read, sort, and delete email. Sending email had to be accomplished with another program. By the late 1970’s, email was saved in a standard format that’s practically identical to how email is stored on contemporary email servers. That’s correct; the format we use nowadays is over 40 years old.

ARPANET: A Trusted Environment

ARPANET was a trusted environment. Everybody using this new email system has been entrusted to use computers costing hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars. Most users of the network knew each other in some manner. In reality, if you had to look up a colleague’s email address, then you could refer to a printed list of each email owner and their address. Technologically speaking, nothing stopped them from abusing email. Nothing stopped them from impersonating another person or sending a malicious payload with the email. This altered on one particular day in 1978 when an overly greedy Digital Equipment Corporation salesman sent advertising material to every individual on the printed list of speeches, getting the first spammer. He never heard the end of this. INTERNET: A Untrusted Environment Eventually, commercial entities such as MCI desired to be part of ARPANET. In the 1980’s, ARPANET became the INTERNET. With each these new companies and people online, the Internet was full of people who no longer understood each other straight. These ancient Internet users wanted to communicate with each other just the same, and because of this, email was one of the first”killer” programs! Email has been fundamental in making the Web what it is now. But email did not become what it is today until the mid 1990’s. It was just text which could be routed over the Internet, and it was designed to work in a reliable environment. They were added after the fact. As the DEC salesman (the first spammer) so blatantly pointed out, all anyone had to do to send spam successfully was to try. The DEC salesman was not malicious however, just eager to make a sale. However, what about people who did have malicious intent? All they had to do to abuse the machine was attempt. Consequently, email is abused greatly. Email is used as an attack vector in malware, adware, malware, ransomware, and more. Technologies such as SPF, DKIM, blacklists, and others are just bandaids into a product that’s developed on a virtually broken trust model.

Email Today

We’ve begun to expect that emails should be obtained within minutes with no probable interruptions. When communicating using email addresses on the exact same system (like sending to and from Gmail) which is a fairly reasonable anticipation. What can complicate things? The fact each email server is not required to work in the exact same fashion in any way. Some are vastly different. Instead, email servers are only required to speak the exact same language so they can communicate with each other.

How can that impact you personally? At times, email may not function as anticipated. Mail servers at various business arbitrarily block emails coming with an email address, domainname, or email server. This type of block can occur without warning, explanation, or perhaps so much as a second opportunity. Other email hosts can delay an email in a bid to make the sender prove themselves to be a true server. Others might employ spam filters which incorrectly mark email as spam, causing delivery problems. There are dozens of ways that an email can fail to achieve its destination immediately.

At best email hosting for small business uk, we have done our very best to provide a good cheap email hosting solution, but we understand that things don’t always go according to plan. Email is a intricate service that’s surprisingly hard to supply! If you’re having problems with your own email hosted in email hosting, let us know and we’ll be pleased to assist you!