This isn't the first time email lists have flirted with collapse, however.
The first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson in 1971, a simple test message to himself. His message evolved almost immediately into broader discussions, although only a few remained active for long. By the close of the 70s, there were 17 public email discussion lists on the ARPAnet, the precursor to today's Internet. By 1982, there were 44, according to at least one account. Others were springing up by the dozens on private academic networks such as PLATO and BITNET.
But as vibrant as these were, their own inefficiencies led to a crisis almost as dire as today's. At that time, lists were mostly run by hand, which meant that an actual human being had to respond to subscription requests and other problems. When these lists proliferated, it often took weeks for requests to be fulfilled.
Adding to problems were traffic jams caused by the era's still-scarce bandwidth. Single messages were sent out to hundreds of addresses at a time, clogging transatlantic lines so badly that emails between Europe and the United States sometimes took a week to be delivered. Some people on the lists started discussing whether email discussion groups should be banned altogether.
The crisis soon passed, however. In 1986, a BITNET programmer in Paris named Eric Thomas wrote a tool called Listserv that automated the administrator's task of managing subscriptions. It also made message distribution more efficient, virtually eliminating the crippling traffic jams. The tool was quickly adopted elsewhere, and the number of email lists on academic networks exploded.
A half-decade later, an American programmer named Brent Thomas started looking around for tools to help automate Internet-based mailing lists. He found Listserv, but decided he could write a new one as quickly as he could learn the old tool, and in a week created a program called Majordomo and a scant 3,000 lines of code. Both tools are still widely used today.
Over the ensuing decade, the shape of mailing lists has remained largely the same. Web-based services such as E-Groups, which Yahoo later bought and turned into Yahoo Groups, attracted hundreds of thousands of discussions, but the fundamental idea hasn't changed much.
