Months ago I was asked to teach a “secure e-mail session” for an Infosecurity “Security Leadership Conference.” I delivered a presentation in May in Washington, but I warned that there is not really anything new and exciting in this area. I was right, and they agreed and so I did not deliver the talk after the DC event. I’ve put the slides here.

Recently, I’ve been blogging about my move from PC to Mac (see PC2Mac. In my next entry, I’ll talk about selecting an e-mail client. E-mail is very important to me. (See what I wrote about this in Disconnect.) So, I started thinking about all the e-mail clients (user-end programs) I used over the years. At the risk of revealing my advanced years, here is the list.

West Hempstead High School, NY
I don’t remember the name of it, but it was the local e-mail system on the DEC-10 timesharing system to which we connected via an acoustical coupler using a Teletype teleprinter. (That’s a papertape reader/writer on the left.) Practically speaking, there was no one to e-mail (except the system manager). There was no Internet. (But, we were happy.)

University of Dayton
I don’t recall e-mail. Maybe. We used a Univac Spectra 70/7 timesharing machine. (It is mentioned and pictured in this personal history from my classmate, Ken.)

NSA
/bin/mail on a (pre-TCP/IP) networked 6th Edition Unix system. This is essentially the same mail program on the command lines of Unix systems today.

Digital Equipment Corporation

• VMS MAIL, from the command line.
• ALL-IN-1 e-mail on VMS (an early Outlook- or Entourage-like character-cell e-mail program. (Like Outlook, it ignores standards.)
• Berkeley Mail on Ultrix
• MH, when I grew up.
• Emac mail, for a while
• xmh, when I got a workstation and X11

TIS
xmh

Avolio Consulting

Eudora
• Now, on the Mac… I’ll post something soon.

I’m doing a members only briefing on email security for The Institute for Applied Network Security on August 9, 2005 as part of their Institute Virtual program.

I am also speaking on the topic of email security in December. See my Speaking and Teaching Calendar for details.

Last week at Interop, at Secure E-mail Day, one of the discussion topics was spam. I’ve written on the subject, for example here, here, and here.

Bruce Schneier writes about e-mail spam and VoIP spam in Combating Spam.

You would think that notification of big winnings in an international lottery (for example, the HEMALOTERIJ NL,/INTERNATIONAL PROMOTION PROGRAMES.NL) would come in something more official than an email message.

The burning question I have is not why it took so long to get these “long awaited results.” Nor, do I wonder why it slipped through my spam filter (scoring a measly 3.6 — though it did end up in my “Maybe Spam” folder). No, I wonder why these lottery people — why not one of them — know how to correctly punctuate a sentence. I know English is a second language to the officials in the “INTERNATIONAL PROMOTIONS DEPT.” But, in most languages — at least western ones–doesn’t everyone leave a space or blank after a period or comma and between words? And doesn’t everyone capitalize the first word of a sentence?

Anyway, I guess I won’t care once I claim my prize of “1,000,000.00Euros (ONE MILLION EUROS.) in cash” (in cash?!?!) using my claim number and contacting “MR MARK DUFFMAN Foreign Transfer Manager.” Hmmm, I’ve already written too much. I would not want someone to claim this prize! Thank you, “Mrs. Liliana Remoud!”

I wonder how much 1 million Eurodollars in cash weighs.