Ray Tomlinson & the history of email in his own words

Ray Tomlinson passed away this weekend, truly an internet pioneer and one that has more claim to the "inventor of email" moniker than any other. #RIP

It is the third legendary MIT-alumni Internet founding father to pass this year, Marvin Minsky died in January, and Wesley A. Clark in February.

Over at bbn.com Ray Tomlinson, shares the story of 'inventing' email in his own words:

"During the summer and autumn of 1971, I was part of a small group of programmers who were developing a time-sharing system called TENEX that ran on Digital PDP-10 computers. We were supporting a larger group working on natural language. Earlier, I had worked on the Network Control Protocol (NCP) for TENEX and network programs such as an experimental file transfer program called CPYNET.

I was making improvements to the local inter-user mail program called SNDMSG. Single-computer electronic mail had existed since at least the early 1960's and http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/firstemailframe.html

In recognition of all his work, and his unique contribution to email, today Deliverability.Buzz has a special commemorative edition recognizing Rays achievements.

Learn from Mandrill: The Cost of Free

iControlWP has written a great post on the business lessons learned from Mandrill and why "Free" may be your most expensive choice in the longer term.

https://www.icontrolwp.com/blog/life-after-mandrill/ 

Remember to catchup on it all: Deliverability.Buzz  and the dedicated Mandrill paper:li : The Mandrill Migration Special Edition

AWS wants to welcome Mandrill users

This article is clipped from the Amazon SES Blog as it forbids crawlers which precluded its inclusion in Deliverability.Buzz  and the dedicated Mandrill paper:li : The Mandrill Migration Special Edition

After the recent announcement of changes with Mandrill, we have received many questions from Mandrill customers who are looking at options for email service providers.

Moving to a new platform can be daunting. If you want to understand what SES is and what it can do for you, check out our product detail page and Getting Started guide. We also have our re:Invent 2014 and 2015 presentations, with real-world examples on how to use the email sending and receiving capabilities of SES. Like many other AWS products, SES offers a free tier.

If you’re ready to dive in and start your migration, we have put together a list of resources to get you up and running with SES.

• If you send emails through an SMTP interface, check out our SMTP endpoints.
• If you send emails through a web API, take a look at the SES API. You can interact with the SES API directlythrough HTTPS, or use one of the many AWS SDKs that take care of the details for you. AWS SDKs are available for Android, iOS, Java, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python, and Ruby.
• If you are an API user, note that:
  • Mandrill’s send method corresponds to SES’s SendEmail.
  • Mandrill’s send-raw method corresponds to SES’s SendRawEmail.
  • There is no corresponding send_at parameter for SES – messages are queued for delivery when you make an email-sending call to SES.
  • There is no need to specify async – SES API calls are inherently asynchronous.
• If you process incoming email, we offer the ability to receive those emails through SES. Through our inbound processing, you can save your emails to S3, receive SNS notifications, and perform custom logic using Lambda.
• To help you maintain good deliverability, we can automatically DKIM-sign your emails using Easy DKIM. (You are also free to do that manually.)
• SES offers a mailbox simulator you can use to test your application’s handling of scenarios such as deliveries, bounces, and complaints.

Read the full post at  Amazon SES Blog 

View the special Mandrill Migration edition of Deliverability.Buzz