Setting Up Mail

Abstract

In terms of Internet history, electronic mail is stone old. When the World Wide Web was conceived in the early 1990s, e-mail already had reached its age of maturity. The first electronic mail between two networked computers was sent in 1971, over the Internet’s predecessor, ARPANET. Even though e-mail predates most other applications you use on the Internet—with the exception of the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), which is about as old—e-mail is still one of the most popular functions of the Internet today (and this is not only because someone somewhere chose you to help him get his inheritance out of the country). Even with spam mails rising to levels of 70 to 90 percent of all mails sent, most Internet users write and receive mails on a daily basis.