Mail

Files
World Wide Web
Applications

The application that got me hooked on the Internet was mail. I had already learned through using BBS Networks that it was possible to exchange messages with people around the world in a day or two, much faster than normal mail, and much cheaper than international calling. But one day, in my early days of exploring the Internet, I sent a message to a fellow in South Africa, and his reply came back to me before I had finished dealing with the rest of the mail I had waiting for me. In other words, what BBS networks can do in a day or two, the Internet can do in mere minutes. This is the big attraction of telecommunications for me: the ability to communicate far and wide, quickly and inexpensively. It's not about technology in the end, it's about people.

But Internet mail is not just about exchanging messages with people. It has been said that "anything worth doing on the Internet can be done through mail." Since many connections to the Internet in the early days were not live connections, but intermittent sessions using assorted connection protocols like uucp and SLIP, many ingenious ways were developed to exchange files and information through mail alone.

Files

One of the most popular applications on the Internet is getting files, so it stands to reason that there would be a demand for user on the Internet to be able to send files to one another as well. Sure enough, one of the first things people did once the Internet got started was to figure out ways around the limitations of the mail protocols. For one thing, applications, and even some data files, use eight bits to define each character, but the ASCII specification, upon which the Internet mail system was based, uses only seven bits per character. All of the standard printable characters can be defined using only the first seven bits, and in fact different computers use the different characters which have the eighth bit set "high" to mean different things. (Even using the same operating system, the "eighth-bit-high" can represent different characters, depending on the language in use.)

So, because people want to be able to send full eight-bit files, but the Internet mail gateways could only handle seven-bit files, people invented encoding schemes. An encode program would take an eight-bit file, and translate it so that every "eighth-bit-high" character would be represented by two or more seven-bit characters. This made the files larger, but it did enable them to be transmitted through mail gateways without being altered or rejected. At the other end, the recipient would use a decode program to get the file back to its original eight-bit form so they could use it. Nowadays, most E-mail clients have encoding and decoding utilities built in, so people just think about sending file attachments, and don't have to consider the different steps in the process of making it happen.

Using file attachments, it is even possible to get files from an ftp site, right through the mail. There are different gateway systems which will accept commands in a specific format, get the file from the ftp site, and then mail it to the address of the person who sent the commands in the first place.

World Wide Web

In the same way that there are servers which will send you a file from an ftp site through the mail, there are sites which will mail you pages from the world wide web. (Granted, there's not much point to trying to that if the web site you are trying to access has things like streaming audio or video files, but it is possible.)

Applications

Actually, using gateway servers to get files or web sites mailed to you is but one possibility for the use of mail-enabled applications. It is possible to set up a database to accept input and generate reports based on incoming mail. (I once earned money doing data entry for a price comparison service. I'd scan the local papers looking for prices, and when I found one, I'd type it into a message using a specific format. The messages were addressed, not to a person, but directly to the database computer. (There was an address specifically set up for the database to read.) When the messages arrived at the database, it would scan each message, decode the format to determine the nature of the item, the price, and the name of the merchant, and update itself accordingly. Automated mailing list servers are another example of an application which responds to commands received by mail.

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