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Inbox / Charles Bermant
Pre-Internet e-mail: small-scale and spam-free

By Charles Bermant
Special to The Seattle Times

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Ten years ago, the face of e-mail was quite different than the ubiquitous communications arena it is now. To paraphrase a campaigning president, we might ask if we are better off today than a decade ago, and the answer would be a resounding affirmative.

It's hard to say exactly where nascent e-mail was on April 17, 1994, but there emerge a few clear impressions. I had two accounts, MCI Mail and America Online. They were stratified into A and B lists, with important contacts reached through MCI and riffraff communicating through AOL. There was some exciting software meant to pull messages from both services into an interface that looked something like Outlook (which was then called Microsoft Mail) but it never worked. At least not for me.

There were ways to send attachments in both systems, but this wasn't exactly foolproof either. You had to spend so much setup, resend and explanation time that half the day was wasted. For this reason, sending a file within an office was a ridiculous idea. And Federal Express or fax was still a smarter way to send material long distance.

Since using e-mail was such a difficult process it became an elitist tool. If you couldn't master the secret handshake, you didn't belong in the club.

The most significant aspect of MCI Mail and AOL was their closed architecture. While sending messages from one system to another was theoretically possible, it wasn't something normal people could accomplish.

This didn't seem like a huge disadvantage. If you wanted to talk to someone, it was a given you both had to use the same system. Getting your mother an AOL account was then popular but became a good news/bad news gift: It gave her motivation to learn a new skill but gave her another way to say, "You don't call, you don't write."

Spam didn't exist. Your e-mail box was a private domain, especially since you controlled the access carefully. With few people online to begin with, things were kept small, anyway. For people to send a message they needed a specific invitation. AOL did some early marketing that was an early spam ancestor, but it wasn't annoying or plentiful enough to be an issue.

Then came the Internet, with its buffet-style communication. All you can stomach for one low price. It was really tasty for a while, but indigestion wasn't far behind.

We don't know where the crossroads occurred, where someone could have stepped in and tamed the e-mail beast before it got out of hand. They would have established a toll system, charging a micro payment for each message sent. This would have stopped spam before it began, or at least legitimized e-mail marketing.

But I'm glad this particular ball was dropped. The e-mail universe may be a tad untamed and imperfect, but its anarchy still makes it cool. To have channeled the last decade's growth into more "positive" areas would have made things less interesting. There would be no spam, but we'd also miss out on MoveOn.org, great gossip and Internet myths.
 
Some hassles notwithstanding, it's been a great decade for e-mail. I can't wait to see what happens next.

If you have questions or suggestions for Charles Bermant, you can contact him by e-mail at cbermant@seattletimes.com. Type Inbox in the subject field. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.

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