holy god email

[solarbird]

i've been involved in an archiving project that involves reclaiming email messages from the 1990s

it's involved lot of new c code

because it has had to

but if there is anything i know how to do in code it's rebuild clusterfucked email storage into something usable

and i just have to say

now that i have over 15,000 reclaimed messages from a collection of formats

(microsoft mail mmf, early-outlook pst, microsoft exchange client pst, amigauucp, xenix mtp, BITNET (in all caps because BITNET), early internet where nobody seemed to understand rfc-822 and i'm not just looking at you microsoft but i am looking at you microsoft, several thousand messages where the storage solution was apparently "select a bunch of messages and save as text file with an assortment of different line endings (dos/windows and amiga/linux/unix)" and more)

all sitting nicely in imap folders

all i can say is

holy FUCK email was a nightmare in the 1990s.

holy fuck.

how did anyone use this etc.

i mean

fuck.

Comments

[ckd]

I was running mail servers that sent out email to fairly large lists in the 1990s. Oh, there was so much SMTP fail in the world; I don't even want to know what sort of ridiculous storage backends were behind some of them.

[sistawendy]

Email worked well at universities on various flavors of Linux back in the day, but consumer OSes? Yup, a cluster.