Applications Folder: MailPlane 4

To think there was a day when I was excited about email.

When I went to college, I got my first Internet access, and discovered that while we were banned from using the real-time chat protocol talk, you could still have free instantaneous chats with friends by sending email back and forth. My first use of Internet email was, then, to send text messages via a unix command-line.

It was in the fall of 1992, at UC Berkeley, where I finally got email on my Mac, courtesy of a version of the free Eudora email app that was hacked to dial in to a command-line server, connect itself to your account, and download your mail directly. A few months later I got a legitimate internet dial-up account from the University and thus begun 25 years (!) and counting of reading email on the Mac.

At some point Eudora died, and at some point after that I finally gave up on it.…