The Eudora™ Email Client Source Code

Electronic mail is one of “killer apps” of networked computing. The ability to quickly send and receive messages without having to be online at the same time created a new form of human communication. By now billions of people have used email.

Email has a long and storied history, dating back to MIT’s Compatible Time Sharing System (CTSS) and the US government’s AUTODIN in the early 1960s. These early systems, which often used propriety communications networks and protocols, were generally incompatible with each other; you could only exchange mail with people using the same system.

The first email on the ARPANET (the predecessor of today’s internet) was sent by Ray Tomlinson in 1971, and mail formats became standardized (RFC 524, RFC 561) soon thereafter…