The necessity for better email management and email archiving grows everyday. Email (electronic mail) changes and evolves with technology. In order to understand the email management technology that will be best for you or for your business let's take a step back and look at the origins of email itself.

Where Did Email Come From? Believe it or not, email actually existed before the Internet did. The use of email began as early as 1965 when users of mainframe computers (huge computers that are used to store massive amount of data such as census reports, etc.) would share time on one computer because it was impossible to buy lots of little personal computers as there were none. These mainframe computer users would leave electronic messages on the computer for other users who would be using the same computer at another time. In a way, it was like simply leaving a note on an office desk for a co-worker, but the message was electronic and thus did represent an early form of electronic mail.

The ARPANET Contributes to Email and Email Management The ARPANET computer network was the intellectual predecessor to the Internet. The ARPANET was also the first network that allowed data to be transferred in packets (referred to as packet switching). Transferring data in packets allowed more information and communication to go through one physical line instead of many lines which either carried communication from one node to another or were dormant as was often the case when circuit switching was the main method of data transport. The ARPANET greatly increased the popularity of using email as a means of communication. The ARPANET probably also led to folders and other email management tools, which were helpful in the organization and location of specific emails.

What About the @ Sign? The development and the evolution of the ARPANET also led to new developments in electronic mail. Ray Tomlinson was one of the privileged few who had access to the ARPANET and was the first to use the @ sign to separate the name of the user from the name of his/her computer. Through the developments of the ARPANET and Ray Tomlinson's contributions, email rapidly became more popular amongst computer literates. Email soon became the killer application of the ARPANET.

Additional Email Management Solutions As more and more people began to be aware of the ARPANET, they began to be aware of the benefits of rapid electronic communication. Because of the demand, other protocols were developed for other groups with time-sharing computers. These protocols allowed many groups to send electronic messages to each other. They then started sending messages to other computers which required the name of the sender's computer and the name of the receiver's computer instead of just one sender name and one computer name.

Networked Email and Increased Email Management With the development of local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs), email was able to be transferred electronically from one node to another or from one computer to many others. The process today uses mail user agents and mail transfer agents to send emails almost anywhere in the world.

Email Management Tools Email management solutions are in demand today. Users want email management tools to do the following:

1) Store copies of in-bound, out-bound, and internal e-mails.

2) Provide spam, failover, anti-virus, data storage, and compliance services.

3) Avoid negative affects on email management users and email management infrastructure.

4) Make installation easy with e-mail archiving, spam filter, compliance, anti-virus.

5) Provide 2TB of RAID 5 storage.

Most of the information in this article can be referenced to the following link.

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