Space Technology

AsiaBSDCon 2009 Keynote Speech. Speaker:

Eric Allman is the original author of sendmail, and a long time contributor to Berkeley UNIX. He also wrote the -me macros, tset, trek, syslog, and vacation. Besides UNIX and sendmail, Eric has worked on database management, window systems, neural-net-based speech recognition, system administration, and networking.

Allman is Chief Science Officer and co-founder of Sendmail, Inc. Before joining Sendmail, Allman served as CTO for Sift, Inc., which is now part of 24/7 Media, Inc. He was lead developer and provided a large-scale research software infrastructure on the Mammoth project at U.C. Berkeley. Allman has contributed as a senior developer at the International Computer Science Institute to neural network systems design. Allman was also Chief Programmer on the INGRES Relational Database Management System.

Formerly, Allman co-authored the "C Advisor" column for UNIX Review magazine and was a member of the Board of Directors of USENIX Association. He is currently a Program Chair for the Conference on Email and Anti-Spam and a member of the ACM Queue Editorial Review Board and the Board of Trustees of Cal Performances.

Allman holds an Masters of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Abstract:

Email existed before the Internet was invented, and grew with the Internet over six orders of magnitude. Email has gone from serving a small community of highly technical colleagues to being ubiquitous, even for people who are not technically adept. It has changed from a tiny, no-profit service to a billion dollar business.

But email has not gone without growing pains. Spam, viruses, and phishing are just two examples of malware that didn't even exist when email was born. Email has changed both business and social lives in ways both good and bad. Some of those pressures have pushed users from email to Instant Messaging and Social Networking. Today the research and development of email has focused on control, either "on the wire" (anti-spam, data loss prevention, etc.) or directly for the user (such as mobile access or managing information overload).

This talk covers the history of email and reviews where we are today, including current technologies such as email authentication (DKIM and SenderID) and reputation. It concludes with some personal speculation about how email will continue to grow both short- and long-term.