Then NeXTSTEP became OpenStep/OPENSTEP and Mail.app went with it. And OPENSTEP begat Rhapsody. And Rhadsody begat OS X. (Full genealogy on Wikipedia).

Steve Jobs, ever the polished salesman (image from Puckman )

Don Yacktman , then a OpenStep developer, wrote an article in 1997 which outlines how bundles or plugins worked in Mail.app and what they did.

He describes plugins like Cryptor (PGP encryption) and URLifier which placed a clickable icon in front of URLs:

Colorizer scanned headers for keywords and patterns and enabled you to modify the summary of messages (what we call the List View) according to the matches.

For example, you could place a big red arrow next to emails from your boss or colour the background of emails from your spouse pink.

Other plugins opened HTML email in the browser of your choice.

But the greatest of them all was EnhanceMail:

It collects a number of cool hacks into a single bundle. In displayed messages, it can turn smilies such as “:-)” into graphic smiley-faces. (There are over a dozen smiley graphics it uses to display the various types of smilies.) It has a wide variety of options for appending signatures (including “rich” signatures with graphics and various fonts) and options for quoting text from the original message. A user can even highlight a passage in a message, hit “Reply”, and only that passage will appear quoted in the response, making it easier to trim down quoted text. It also adds support for X-face graphics and adds an X-Image-Url: header which can be used to supply a better looking mail face picture. (It automatically looks up the images and displays them instead of the xfaces. And it caches them on your hard drive, too.) It adds several other highly useful features as well.

It’s amazing, he says, that in 1997 there were so many great plugins for Mail.app:

That’s a lot of modification for an application that doesn’t have a published API.

Despite this, he regards the design decision by NeXT which allowed Mail.app to load bundles on start-up as a crucial one in the app’s development:

A bundle developer can walk outside of the published API and make changes to applications that the application’s authors never even considered in their wildest dreams. In other words, by loading bundles, applications are throwing the door to future customizations wide open.

Amen to that!

Fulfill your wildest dreams on the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List.OPENSTEP, OpenStep, NeXTSTEP, mail.app, apple mail, history, plugins, bundles, APISimilar Posts:

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It covers Phil Zimmermann’s first steps with PGP, the lawsuits with the US Government, the launch of OpenPGP, GnuPG, legal aspects of encryption and more.

A brief quotation:

The ideas behind PGP had been known and understood by computer scientists and mathematicians for years, so the underlying concepts weren’t truly innovative. Zimmermann’s real innovation was in making these tools usable by anyone with a home computer. Even early versions of PGP gave people with standard DOS-based home computers access to military-grade encryption.

UPDATE: Mirko posts a link in the comments to an audio interview with Jon Callas , CTO at PGP Corporation, who also explains the history of PGP. Thanks.pgp, gpg, encryption, privacy, Zimmermann, OpenPGP, GnuPG, history

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Here you can read about the very beginnings of email in the CTSS project at MIT, the birth of ARPANet and its contribution to email and Ray Tomlinson‘s “invention” of the @ sign as an addressing convention.

It also contains a link to Brad Templeton’s History of Spam .email, history, spam, ARPANet, Multics, CTSS, RFC Similar Posts:

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It covers everything from emoticons and RFC 2822 to MIME encoding, lots of stuff on headers and the politics of quoting, including one of my favourite topics, the great top vs bottom posting debate.

It may not be as up-to-date as it could be, but it is still a great resource and a feast of browsing for people who want to learn a bit more about how email works.email, tips, history, emoticons, quotingSimilar Posts:

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Known as NeXTMail or simply Mail.app, it was a powerful and fully-featured program, more powerful than its descendant Mail 2.0 in some ways, although less powerful in others.

The importance of NeXTMail for OS X’s Mail.app is clear at once from a screenshot of NeXTMail’s interface:

Read on to take a look at Apple Mail in its early years, see what it could do, and hear what some people remember about using it.

Steve Job’s welcome email shows that NeXTMail contains all the basics of the Mail 2.0 interface — message list and preview windows, toolbar, sophisticated treatment of graphics and full support for RTF. In fact, it predated MIME, the international standard that governs virtually all email communication today, and was based on a message format of its own. Don Yacktman remembers that for all its beauty, communication with the outside world could be awkward: “If you didn’t have NeXTMail yourself and got a rich message, it was pretty obnoxious. (Rich messages were sent as an RTFD file that was tarred up, compressed, and uuencoded — .tar.Z.uu)”.

NeXTMail on the NeXTSTEP Workspace shows the origin of more Mail 2.0 features:

Here you see LipService and X-faces in action (see more below), the free-floating NeXTSTEP app-specific menu in the top left, the likwise free-floating mailbox list, and the NeXTSTEP Address Book. (Note too the “Father of the Dock” in the top right of the screen).

Some NeXTMail preference panes give a further sense of the app’s abilities:

Surprisingly, especially in a world where software bloat is all too common, some of the things that NeXTMail could do are missing from Mail 2.0. John Kheit lists three of them:

• LipService (this was a system wide service that was part of the app/sound kit (today’s Cocoa)). Click a lips icon (next to compose icon) and talk into the built in mic. It records and adds your recording as an attachment. The attachment is an icon of a pair of lips (see the first screenshot above). Click on it and play.
• Read receipt ability. The ability to set receive and read receipts. The ability to send receipts or purposefully not send them (via a hidden pref setting).
• Plug-in architecture that allowed for mailfaces. It set up a universal database and ability to have mail icons from anyone that wanted to participate.

Developers have tried to replace these missing features — iSay and MailVoiceClip for LipService, MailPriority for read receipts (doesn’t work in Tiger), MailPictures for X-images-URL and pictures of senders not in your Address Book — but the decision to remove them in the first place is puzzling.

Despite this, Don Yacktman points out that (some) things have changed for the better:

On the whole, I really like what Mail.app can do these days. Don’t forget that it can also do a lot of things the original Mail.app never did. The anti-spam and filtering features are huge improvements. NeXTMail also had fewer options for connecting to mail servers, no ability for multiple .sig files, piss-poor message quoting abilities (needed plugins to make it bearable) and so on. On the whole, while a few NeXTMail features may be missing, what we have in OS X today is much, much better. That is not to say that there isn’t plenty of room for improvement, though. Apple should keep making it better. And I think it is hugely annoying that Apple isn’t yet supporting an official API for plugin writers.

With thanks to John Kheit and Don Yacktman, who answered queries, offered pointers and opinions and provided some of the screenshots.

Hawk Wings is interested in the Prehistory of Apple Mail and welcomes any reminiscences, opinions or information on the journey from NeXTMail to Mail 2.0.3. Got some?NeXTMail, NeXTSTEP, mail.app, apple mail, return receipts, x-faces, history, address book, history of apple mailSimilar Posts:

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