The Application That Made The Internet Is Now Its Greatest Flaw

So what is nearly 50 years old and drove the adoption of the Internet? Well it’s good old email. And so, in 1971, Ray Tomlinson sat beside two computers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and transferred a single message of …

QWERTYUIOP

From there, email has been the driving force for the adoption of the Internet, and is the application that most shapes our digital world. The simplicity of the method and the usage of the “@” symbol, just worked so well, along the ability to attach files. It truly build the foundation of our information age. And so, SNDMSG, READMAIL and CYPNET (the program to attach files) were born, and basically, after a good few RFCs and several decades, the actual methods involved with email have never really grown up.

The special child who never really grew up

They are basically stuck in the 1980s, and have never grown up. Underneath, the Lotus ccMail package that I used in the 1980s is not that different from the Microsoft Outlook client that I use now. It still does the same thing, and cares little about the actual trustworthiness of the messages that I receive. We now have a whole lot of filtering going on to guess when something is credible or not, but it doesn’t actually work! Thus a system administrator in 2019…