Email could have been X.400 times better

If the history of email had gone somewhat differently, the last email you sent could have been rescinded or superseded by a newer version when you accidentally wrote the wrong thing. It could have been scheduled to arrive an hour from now. It could have auto-destructed if not read by midnight.

You would never have needed to type “as per my previous message.” Instead, you could have linked emails together into a personal Wikipedia of correspondence. You could have messaged an entire organization or department, with your email app ensuring the message was deliverable before it left your outbox.

And you could have attached files and written a multilingual message with letters beyond ASCII’s 128 characters, eight years before those features came to internet email. You could have been notified when the message was read a full 15 years before email had something similar tacked on. Encryption would have been baked in from the start, rather than waiting for PGP, S/MIME, and TLS to add them later.

All that, and more, was standardized in the 1984 spec for X.400 as Interpersonal Messaging. It was everything we call email today, and then some.

“We had a better system back in the day: X.400,” as one commentator reminisced. SMTP, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol that became the standard behind how modern email is sent, “didn’t win because it was ‘better,’” he argued, but “just because it was easier to implement. Like a car with no brakes or seatbelts.”

“Of all the things OSI has produced, one could point to X.400 as being the most successful,” agreed Marshall T. Rose, a developer who helped bridge the differences between X.400 and SMTP email. Differences like X.400 email addresses with bang path-esque addresses like C=no; ADMD=; PRMD=uninett; O=uninett; S=alvestrand; G=harald while SMTP email addresses looked like [email protected].

“On the other hand,” he concluded, “that’s kind of like saying that World War II was the successful conclusion of the Great Depression.”

Come, let us build a standard

Six months before Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, the United States Department of Defense started building ARPANET, a network to link computers around the country, budgeted from money redirected from missile defense. It was on that network that email as we know it was invented. Ray Tomlinson pulled file transfer software, the ARPANET network, and the @ symbol together, and in 1971 email was born. Soon enough it was taking up more than 3/4th of all ARPANET traffic.

Email—or at least the idea of email—took the world by storm. CompuServe offered electronic mail to businesses in 1978 and to consumers a year later. Telecoms and governments joined the rush. By 1982, British Telecom launched their Telecom Gold email solution, and USPS tried to monopolize email on paper with E-COM. Yet the majority of those emails were messages inside walled gardens. Someone had to make electronic messages speak the same language.

In stepped the United Nations. Under its auspices, email was almost standardized in October, 1984 under the X.400 spec. It was anything other than concise and jargon-free. The document was 266 pages long and filled with layered communication structures. It was convoluted and late.

Two years earlier, SMTP had been spelled out in 68 short pages. Its email addresses used a refreshingly simple user@domain format. Very quickly, the community effort won out over the committee. X.400 prescribed outcomes, while SMTP described exactly how things should work. The simplicity of SMTP eventually became the foundation of the modern internet.