Early Day Email Applications

Emailing has come a long way now that we have many different email providers, outlook and Gmail to name the most popular ones. But have any of you ever wondered what it was like to use another email service, not to say the ones I have picked out never existed then but they just weren’t as popular as they are today. Well, way back, around about 10 years ago I worked on a functioning address book that would let you send direct mail, whether that would be a newsletter or a messaged to a loved one in an emailing format of your choice.

GNUMail

Web mail was a great revolution for technology, allowing you to instantly send email to anyone with no cost is frankly still mind-blowing to this day. Email application such as GNUMail were the foundations of why E-mailing is an effective way of communicating today. If you’re asking yourself ‘what is GNU Mail’ then to put it simply, it was a basic emailing application that was built on the GNUstep software which allowed developers to rapidly build software with a huge library of reusable components. The email, unlike Gmail and outlook today was a separate client which would offer you ease of access, helping you to store all information in one, safe place where you could access it without internet, this is where my application came in.

Adresses for GNUstep

So down to what I actually created, it seems simple in this day and age but back then having an electronic address book was someone unheard of or at the very least it wouldn’t have been as compatible as ‘Addresses for GNUstep’, thinking about it now, I should have probably given it a better name, something short and sweet. Anyway, what the ‘AGNU’ allowed you to do as you were able to store all your mailing contacts in one place, with enough details to make them easily recognisable from the rest, whether this was photos and notes of the person or their current mobile and work phone numbers, you could essentially store anything you wanted. The reason the programme was made for the GNU software was purely for the fact that I loved the direction in which the developer, Ludovic Marcotte was taking the email client, although now clearly it has died out due to the ‘big dogs’ in the industry coming up with things vastly superior, back then it something that I was so happy to be a part of.

If any of you are interested, here is the link to the Address Book I created for GNUMail around about 10 years ago.