CYBER QUIZ - 3: CHECK THE EMAIL by Dr D.C.Misra

CYBER QUIZ-3: CHECK THE EMAIL

Wish you all a Happy and Prosperous Diwali.

On the eve of the festival of lights in northern India, called Diwali
or Deepawali, when Delhi, the capital of India, is all lit up, here
is the third quiz in our main series of quizzes called CYBER QUIZ on
EMAIL (the first two quizzes in this series were on the INTERNET and
the WORLD WIDE WEB).

Enjoy the quiz and remember comments are always welcome.

Dr D.C.MISRA
November 11,2004

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CYBER QUIZ–3: CHECK THE EMAIL
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Rightly described as the killer app of new technology, people took to
the email as fish takes to water. Individuals now communicate across
nations in a jiffy. And it is still free. No wonder billions of
messages are exchanged over the internet every day, making checking
email a daily habit. But is ours still a small or big world? Let us
check.
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1.(a) What is email, who invented it, and when, (b) If Gmail is email
introduced by search leader, Google, how does it differ from the
conventional email, say Microsoft's Hotmail and (c) With which
company is the decade-old project Remail or Reinventing Email
associated?

2.Which are the top ten countries,in order of rank, in the use of
email and what are the rankings for India and China?

3.Which are the top five email service providers?

4.In 2003,how many(a)daily emails were sent,(b) daily emails sent
per email address,(c)daily emails sent per person,(d)daily emails
sent per corporate user,(e) daily emails received per person,(f)
email addresses per person existed and (g)how much did it cost to
all email users?

5.(a)What is spam, (b) The percentage of total internet email
identified as spam was 45 in March 2003.To what figure did it shoot
up to in February 2004 and (c) What is email harvester?

6.(a) How much amount per year is unwittingly paid by internet users
in receiving spam or junk email, and (b) Americans received 38.6
billion unsolicited email messages in 1999. To what figures was it
expected to rise by end-2000 and 2003?

7.(a) How many emails will be sent to and fro over the web in just
one year– six times the traffic of the snail mail, and (b) How
many email addresses change annually?

8.What was the percentage of spam in the following categories in
February 2004: (a) products, (b) financial, (c) adult (that is, for
persons above 18 years of age), (d) scams, (e) health, (f) Internet
(that is, Internet service and computer-related), (g) leisure, (h)
fraud, (i) political, (j) spiritual, and (k) other?

9.(a) What is the number of registered Indian email users in the
following email service: (i) Yahoo! Mail, (ii) Rediffmail, and (iii)
Hotmail, and (b) What is the number of email users and free storage
capacity allowed in (i) Yahoo!, (iii) Microsoft, (iii) AOL and (iv)
Gmail?

10.What percentage of Internet users say that (a) they cannot do
without email, (b) email makes them more efficient, (c) they waste an
hour every day responding to or deleting irrelevant email, and (d)
check their email at least daily?

11.(a) The number of email messages in the United States was 394.2
billion messages in 1999 as compared to postal mail packets of 201.6
billion. What were the corresponding figures for 2000, and (b) How
many email boxes existed worldwide by end of 1999?

12.(a) Internet Access Takes Flight, screams a news headline. Three
separate projects are under way to bring email and internet access to
commercial airline passengers. Which are these projects and (b) When
and where was the world premiere of airborne Internet allowing a
passenger on board to have Internet connectivity and enable to him to
send and receive emails held?

13.(a) Who invented one of the icons of the wired world– the
symbol "@," (b) Who invented and when the smiley face ":-) "
meaning "hey, I'm only joking" (c) Which was the first commercial
email service, (d) On May 24, 2004 the character "@" was added to
the Morse code. What was the special occasion? and (e) What was
the reason for not allowing a Chinese father to name his son "@"?

14.What are the following: (a) POP3, (b) SMTP, (c) IMAP, (d) MIME,
and (e)S / MIME?

15.(a) It is neither pure email nor pure snail mail (traditional
mail) but a mixture of two. What then is ePost in India and (b) If it
is a commercial software program, what then is EchoMail?

16.What are the following: (a) ePatra, (b) iLeap, (c) Sendmail, (d)
Fetchmail, (e) Passport, (f) List server and (g) Blackberry?

17.(a) A commercial service, this email converts all the snail mail
into email. What is it called, (b) What is shamail, (c) How much
dangerous is email from virus point of view, and (d) What is Google
by Mail?

18.Are two people with computer access really six emails away from
each other? An online research project at Columbia University in New
York has been launched to find an answer to the question whether ours
is really a small world or a big world. What is the name of the
project?

19.(a) An email is not, say the knowledgeable practitioners, an
ordinary letter sent electronically. It is a means of communication
in its own right. How should it then end, and (b) According to the
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, Jodie Williams won the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her contribution to the International
Ban on Landmines. She achieved that ban not only without much
government help, but in the face of opposition from the Big Five
major powers. And what did she say was her secret weapon for
organising 1,000 different human rights and arms control groups on
six continents?

20.(a) If it has been called the Google of email, what is Bloomba,
(b) If it has been called an irritating cousin of SPAM, what is SPIM
(c) What is Thunderbird and (d) Why one needs to be careful in
writing and reading emails?
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ANSWERS TO CYBER QUIZ – 3: CHECK THE EMAIL
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1.(a) Electronic mail. The term is understood to mean exchange of
mail or messages on computers, most notably, but not necessarily,
through the Internet. The first electronic mail (email) was sent
between two machines in 1972 by a BBN engineer called Ray Tomlinson
working in Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) company in Cambridge,
Massachusetts (b) Gmail, whose beta version was announced on April 1,
2004, and is in operation since then, has (free) storage capacity of
1GB (1 gigabyte or 1,000 megabytes) (500,000 pages) as against
Hotmail's (free) 1MB (megabyte), now raised to 2MB. Thus in Gmail
messages are not required to be deleted (due to practically no
limitation on storage), which is not the case with Hotmail. Likewise
messages are also not required to be filed in Gmail as a message once
sent can always be retrieved. (Check also
http://www.google.com/gmail/help/about.html and Hafner, Katie (2004):
In Google We Trust? When the Subject Is E-Mail, May be Not, The New
York Times, Technology / Circuits, April 8, Thursday,
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/technology/circuits/08goog.html.),
and (c) IBM Corp. Visit the website
http://www.research.ibm.com/remail/ (accessed October 23, 2004).

2.1. Finland, 2. Denmark, 3. Australia, 4. United States, 5. Sweden,
6.Ireland, 7. Singapore, 8. Canada, 9. Austria, and 10. Mexico. India
is ranked 35th and China 55th in a ranking of 59 countries with
Vietnam ranked last.

3.1. Hotmail.com (110 million, as of October 2002), 2. Yahoo.com (101
million, as of early 2003), 3. Netease.com (53 million, unspecified
date), 4. Sina.com (20 million, unspecified date) and Rediffmail.com
(20 million, as of July 8, 2003) and 5. Libero.it (10 million, as of
April 2002). (Source: Email Service Providers by Size,
http://www.emailaddresses.com/email_market_size.htm, accessed October
20, 2004).

4.(a) 31 billion, (b) 56, (c) 174, (d) 34, (e) 10, (f) 3.1 average,
(g) $255 million. (Source: Spam Filter Review, Spam Statistics 2004,
http://www.spamfilterreview.com/spam-statistics.html, accessed:
October 18, 2004).

5.(a) It is the unsolicited email messages sent to individuals
usually by companies promoting their wares or organisations espousing
their causes. A survey conducted by Gartner Group in 1999 found that
91 per cent of email users receive spam at least once a week, and
most of them favour either regulating spam or banning it altogether.
(Source: Andrew Buchanan), (b) 62, according to Brightmail, an anti-
spam leader (Source: http://www.brightmail.com/spamstats.html, March
12, 2004), and (c) A computer program that scans websites and
databases for addresses and gather them for spammers, for example,
Target 2001, made by Microsys Technologies, Inc. of Findlay, Ohio.
(Source: Stacy Forester, The Wall Street Journal / The Indian
Express, February 11, 2002).

6.(a) 10 billion euros ($ 9.4 billion). The figure was arrived at by
a study done for the European Commission (EC) covering Europe and the
US as a part of its ongoing efforts to ensure that the development of
the Internet and ecommerce does not undermine Europe's rules on
Internet privacy and data protection, and (b) By end- 2000: 53.6
billion; By 2003: 75.6 billion. Ten per cent of all email is spam.

7.(a) According to one estimate, over 600 billion. (Source: The
Statesman, New Delhi, September 29, 2000), and (b) A third of all
email addresses changes annually, as estimated by market research
firm NFO World Group (http://www.nfo.com/).

8.(a) 24, (b) 18, (c) 14, (d) 11, (e) 7, (f) 6, (g) 6, (h) 4, (i) 2,
(j) 1(one), and (k) 7. (Source:
http://www.brightmail.co/spamstats.htm, March 12, 2004).

9.(a) (i) 8.2, (ii) 4.08, and (iii) 2.3 (Figures in million as in
February 2001). (Note: Hotmail has 110 million customers. It costs
Microsoft $ 1 per year to maintain each mailbox. Ad revenues only
cover 20 per cent of cost. It costs less than a penny for Hotmail to
send an email while it costs 5 to 6 cents for smaller email service
providers. (Source: Olga Kharif and Rutledge, Susann (2002): Clash of
the Free E-Mail Titans, March 1,
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2002/tc2002031_7723.
htm and (b) (i) 40 million (4MB), (ii) 34.4 million (2MB), (iii) 32
million (20MB), and (iv) Service yet to be formally launched,
currently in beta version. (Figures in parentheses indicate free
storage capacity provided) (Source: Hafner, Katie (2004): In Google
We Trust? When the Subject Is E-Mail, May be Not, The New York Times,
Technology / Circuits, April 8, Thursday,
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/technology/circuits/08goog.html).
Since then the free storage limit in Yahoo! Mail has been raised to
100 MB.

10.(a) 70, and (b) 60, according to the E-Mail Marketing Report 2000
by US - based eMarketer, (c) 94 (Source: eMarketer 2000 ), and (d)
93, including 43 per cent who check it more than once a day and 36
per cent who check it more than five times a day. The survey was done
online. It is therefore skewed towards heavy Internet users (Source:
Spam Recycling Center E-mail User Survey 2000, Dataquest, December
15, 2000).

11.(a) Email – 536.3 billion messages; Postal mail – 206.4
billion packets (Source: eMarketer 2000 ), and (b) About 570 million,
almost six times the number in 1995. Out of these the Americans had
334 million.

12.(a) 1. In Flight Networks, the Globalstar Satellite Network, and
Qualcomm Inc. partnership. It will operate at 200 kbps and will be
deployed in late 2001, 2. Air Canada will offer it in some of 767
aircrafts, and 3. Boeing Co. will offer high-speed connections in
partnership with CNN, Mitsubishi Electric, and Loral Skynet (Source:
Cheryl Rosen, informationweek.com) and (b) On May 17, 2004 on board
the Lufthansa Flight No. LH 452, flying from Munich, Germany to Los
Angeles, California. Passengers on this flight were first in the
world to experience real-time, WiFi-based, high-speed internet
connectivity on a commercial flight route. (Source: News Releases
dated May 11, 2004,
http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2004/q2/nr_040511j.html, and
dated May 17, 2004,
http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2004/q2/nr_040517j.html, accessed
October 20, 2004).

13.(a) Ray Tomlinson in 1972. When this inventor of email wanted to
separate sender identification (ID) from the machine.id on which he
had the mail box, he examined the keyboard and rejected the alphabet
as the letters could not separate the two identities. He then
examined and rejected the punctuation marks as clumsy. Ultimately he
selected symbol @ - meaning at- which met his requirement, (b) Scott
Fahlman, an IBM researcher working on artificial intelligence (AI),
on September 19, 1982 when he typed " :-)" in an online
message. In the 80s, users of a Carnegie Mellon University bulletin
board proposed a variety of markers for humorous comments like *,%,
&, (#) and \----/ . Fahlman suggested :-) along with the admonition
to read it sideways. The practice spread as Internet users found the
symbol useful as a rough approximation of a twinkle in the eye.
(Source: The Indian Express, New Delhi, September 20, 2002 / Andy
Sullivan, Washington, September 19, 2002, Reuters) (c) OnTyme in
1976. It, however, found a limited market as the number of computer
owners was very small at that time. Commercial email service began
among 25 U.S. cities in 1982 and (d) The 160th anniversary of the
first telegraphic transmission on May 24, 1844. The International
Telecommunication Union (ITU), Geneva voted in December 2003 to
include the character "@" in the Morse code. Morse code is
used by amateur radio operators for exchanging emails. The character
"@" has a longer code (17 beats) than the word "at" (11 beats).
However code for "at" sounds like letter "w." (See What Will They
Think of Next: Radio?, February 21, 2004,
http://peterthink.blogs.com/thinking/2004/02/ (accessed October 24,
2004) and Glassman, Mark (2004): @ Issue: Long Code for a Small
Symbol, New York Times, April 15, available:
http://tinyurl.com/6brqc, accessed: October 24, 2004) and (e) The
request was refused as the Chinese law requires the name to be
translated into Mandarin and "@" could not be translated into
Mandarin.

14.(a)Post Office Protocol 3, a protocol used to download the email
to the computer. It can be used with or without SMTP, (b) Simple Mail
Transfer Protocol, a protocol used for sending email between the
servers,(c) Internet Message Access Protocol, a protocol used by an e-
mail client to access email on a shared mail server, (d) Multipurpose
Internet Mail Extensions, a protocol used for supporting graphics,
audio, and video in email (e) Secure MIME, a protocol used for
supporting encryption for secure email.

15.(a) It is a scheme introduced in August 2001 by the Indian Postal
Service for connecting remote villages without Internet connectivity.
A joint venture of India Post and Nettlinx Ltd., under the scheme, a
subscriber is given a generic email id based on the postal index
number (PIN) code of the delivery post office. The domain name is
Indianpostoffice.net. Mails for this address are downloaded at the
nearest epost office, printed, enveloped, and then delivered by the
dedicated postal staff. The tariff is is Rs 10 per A4 size paper. A
prospective user of the service has to get registered online at the
Web site http://www.indiapost.org/ or any of 200 ePost centres in the
country on payment of minimum Rs 250. ePost, in partnership with
Ecomenable, has accepted a 128 – bit secure socket layer (SSL)
Web server certificate for safe and secure transfer of mail. (Source:
Himanshu Singhal, Hindustan Times, February 6, 2002) and (b) It is a
commercial software program that handles a large volume of inbound
and outbound email by automatically receiving, processing,
responding, storing and tracking all correspondence. The program was
developed by EchoMail, Inc., Cambridge, Massachsetts founded by
V.A.Shiva, 37, its CEO. Shiva sometimes calls himself Dr E
–Mail. EchoMail has 125 employees including 30 developers. For
details visit the Web site http://www.echomail.com/. It competes with
larger firms, such as Siebel Systems, Inc., San Mateo, California,
and Kana Software, Inc., Palo Alto, California, that make software
for customer relationship management (CRM) and have an e mail
component. (Source: William M Bulkeley, The Wall Street Journal,
November 28, 2001).

16.(a) The first multiple Indian language email service (Epatra.com)
developed by Webduniya.com, (b) `The intelligent, Internet ready,
Indian language word processor on Windows' developed by
C–DAC, Pune in collaboration with Mithi.com Pvt. Ltd. It can be
downloaded from the website
http://www.cdacindia.com/html/gist/down/ileap - d.asp ,
(c) The most widely used mail transport program in Unix environment
written by Eric Allman. For freeware version of Sendmail™ , visit
the website of Sendmail Consortium at http://www.sendmail.org/ , (d)
`A one– stop solution to the remote mail retrieval problem
for Unix machines'. It is open source software licensed under GNU
General Public License. It was developed by Eric S. Raymond, the
compiler of Jargon File. For details, visit the website
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fetchmail, (e) Microsoft's free e-mail
service. It has 160 million subscribers, and (f) A maililing list
that is administered automatically, and (g) It is an email device,
which also serves as an organiser, address book, and a two-way pager.
Manufactured by Research in Motion, a Canadian company, its latest
model priced at $ 499 is powered by an Intel 386 processor and has
5MB memory (Source: Financial Times).

17.(a) PaperlessPOBox. All the snail mail (traditional paper mail) of
a recipient is received from a PO Box, scanned, and converted to
email and then sent to the recipient's email account the same
day.The snail mail is archived for three months. Founded by David
Nale in San Francisco, California in 1999, the PaperlessPOBox service
was started in 2001. For details, visit the website
http://www.PaperlessPOBox.com, (b) Camera–embedded phones. It
allows users to take snap shots with their mobile phones and send
them to other users via email. The service has been introduced in
Japan on March 1, 2002 by J–Phone, Japan's fast growing
mobile phone group (Source: Michiyo Nakemoto, Tokyo, March 1, 2002,
Financial Times, London / Business Standard, March 2, 2002), (c) It
is estimated that 93 per cent of all viruses are transmitted through
e–mail (Source: Goh Chee Hoh, The Times of India, April 24, 2002)
and (d) Not to be confused with Google Mail or Gmail, it is a a
unique email service by search engine Google. Cape Clear has created
an "asynchronous Google service." Send an email with your
search terms to google@capeclear.com and GoogleMail will send you
top ten results. It can be helpful in low bandwidth situation.
(Source: http://capescience.capeclear.com/google.shtml).

18. Small World Research Project led by Columbia sociologist Duncan
Watts. We live in a "small world " with "six degrees of
separation," so found Stanley Miligram, a Harvard social
psychologist in 1967. The phrase "six degrees of freedom" was
coined by him. It means that two people in the world are separated by
six intermediaries. An article in Nature in 1998 (393: 440 – 442)
by D.J.Watts and S.H. Strogatz attempted to explain the phenomenon in
terms of "random connectors" in a "network." The
research project questions the findings of Miligram and the commonly–held
belief is a small world, after all" by trying to find
whether indeed it is a Big World or Small World. For details, visit the
website, http://smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu/. For an
interesting history (October 2, 2000) of the "small world
problem" which also questions Miligram's conclusion, read Professor
Judith Kleifield, University of Alaska, Fairbanks's paper Could
It Be a Big World After All at the website
http://smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu/history.html. (See also
Hindustan Times, New Delhi, February 7, 2002 / Guardian News Service).

19.(a) The perfect email, says Steve Morris, the author of Perfect@E-
Mail, should end: "Kind regards" or "best wishes". Lucy Kellaway,writing in Financial Times, London, however, says: "The best ending for these messages is no signoff at all. A brief, simple message followed by the name of the sender. Quick, functional and characterless. Just like the medium." One would like to agree
with her, and (b) Email.(Source: Friedman, T.L. (2000): The Lexus and the
Olive Tree, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, http://www.lexusandolivetree.com/).

20.(a) A search engine for emails typically accumulated over years,
which even searches inside attachments, developed by Stata Labs,
Inc., San Mateo, CA founded by Raymie Stata (a professor of web
archeology) and Ray Stata in late 2001. (Bloomba is a phonetic
spelling of blumba meaning historically a metal tag to identify
authentic, fresh and `kosher" meat, and thus identify real
from fake email. For details, visit the website http://www.statalabs.com, (b)
Spam through instant messaging (IM) systems, that is, unsolicited
commercial instant messaging. Spim is set to triple in 2004,according
to Radicati Group, Palo Alto, CA, a technology market research firm.
The company projects that 1.2 billion spims will be sent, a mere
trickle compared to 35 billion spams expected, but the researchers
warn that spim is growing at about three times the rate of spam.
(Source: The Times of India, New Delhi, April 1, 2004, Thursday, p-14
and http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp? id=ns99994822, March
26, 2004), (c) It is an open source email client developed by
Mozilla, an open source software project supported by the Mozilla
Foundation established in 2003. (Source:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird, accessed October 18,
2004) and (d) Communication between humans is approximately 90% body
language, 8% tone of voice, and 2% what you say. With email, you
remove the first 98%, states Email Etiquette. As such one has to be
careful in writing, reading and interpreting emails. (Source: Email
Etiquette, http://www.emailaddresses.com/guide_etiquette.htm,
accessed: October 20, 2004).
______________________________________________________________________
© D.C. Misra 2004. Beta version (Posted: November 11, 2004).
(Source: http://in.groups.yahoo.com/group/cyberquiz/message/140).
______________________________________________________________________
Dr Misra is New Delhi-India-based eGov and IT Consultant.
Email:dcmisra[at]gmail.com