The first exchanges of electronic messages took place in the 1960s with the advent of the first networked computers. Messages could be exchanged between terminals connected to the same mainframe.
It would be in 1965 that the very first e-mail would have been exchanged. As early as 1966, users were able to send each other electronic messages not within the same mainframe, but between several remote sites as long as they were using a compatible system.
This is the network ARPANET (one of the precursors of the Internet) which would have boosted the beginnings of the e-mail. The first experiments of electronic messaging on this network would date from 1969. It would be Ray Tomlinson who in 1971 would have proposed to use the sign @ (arobase) to separate the user name from the name of the server.
At that time, many different protocols coexisted, such as UUCP, BITNET, FidoNet and many others.
In the 1980s, the number of computers connected to LAN-type networks exploded. It is therefore necessary to try to find an interoperable protocol.
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This protocol will finally be SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) which at the beginning of the 80's is directly in competition with UUCP. But SMTP is more efficient for sending e-mails between machines permanently connected to the network.
Since SMTP was originally designed only to send text by e-mail, MIME had to be invented to be able to send binary files (images, sounds, files, ...). It is also thanks to the multipart property of MIME that we can send by e-mail several files, but also a text version and an html version of our messages.
Technically, e-mail as we know it today has existed since the early 1980s. Of course, there have been other technical evolutions, but it is mainly the uses that have changed. And especially the incredible mass of emails that are exchanged every day.
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