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Eugenics

Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have altered various human gene frequencies by inhibiting the fertility of people and groups purported to be inferior or promoting that of those purported to be superior.

The contemporary history of eugenics began in the late 19th century, when a popular eugenics movement emerged in the United Kingdom, and then spread to many countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and most European countries (e.g. Sweden and Germany). In this period, people from across the political spectrum espoused eugenic ideas. Consequently, many countries adopted eugenic policies, intended to improve the quality of their populations' genetic stock.

While it originated as a progressive social movement,   in contemporary usage, the term is closely associated with scientific racism.

Historically, the idea of eugenics has been used to argue for a broad array of practices ranging from prenatal care for mothers deemed genetically desirable to the forced sterilization and murder of those deemed unfit. To population geneticists, the term has included the avoidance of inbreeding without altering allele frequencies; for example, J. B. S. Haldane wrote that "the motor bus, by breaking up inbred village communities, was a powerful eugenic agent." Debate as to what exactly counts as eugenics continues today. Early eugenicists were mostly concerned with factors of measured intelligence that often correlated strongly with social class.

Common distinctions
The aforementioned eugenic programs included both positive measures, such as encouraging individuals deemed particularly "fit" to reproduce, and negative measures, such as marriage prohibitions and forced sterilization of people deemed unfit for reproduction.

In other words, positive eugenics is aimed at encouraging reproduction among the genetically advantaged, for example, the eminently intelligent, the healthy, and the successful. Possible approaches include financial and political stimuli, targeted demographic analyses, in vitro fertilization, egg transplants, and cloning. Negative eugenics aimed to eliminate, through sterilization or segregation, those deemed physically, mentally, or morally "undesirable". This includes abortions, sterilization, and other methods of family planning. Both positive and negative eugenics can be coercive; in Nazi Germany, for example, abortion was illegal for women deemed by the state to be fit.

Academic origins

The term eugenics and its modern field of study were first formulated by Sir. Francis Galton in 1883,   directly drawing on the recent work delineating natural selection by his half-cousin Charles Darwin. He published his observations and conclusions chiefly in his influential book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. Galton himself defined it as "the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations". The first to systematically apply Darwinism theory to human relations, Galton believed that various desirable human qualities were also hereditary ones, although Darwin strongly disagreed with this elaboration of his theory. And it should also be noted that many of the early geneticists were not themselves Darwinians.

Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities and received funding from various sources. Organizations were formed to win public support for and to sway opinion towards responsible eugenic values in parenthood, including the British Eugenics Education Society of 1907 and the American Eugenics Society of 1921. Both sought support from leading clergymen and modified their message to meet religious ideals. In 1909, the Anglican clergymen William Inge and James Peile both wrote for the Eugenics Education Society. Inge was an invited speaker at the 1921 International Eugenics Conference, which was also endorsed by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York Patrick Joseph Hayes.

Three International Eugenics Conferences presented a global venue for eugenicists, with meetings in 1912 in London, and in 1921 and 1932 in New York City. Eugenic policies in the United States were first implemented by state-level legislators in the early 1900s. Eugenic policies also took root in France, Germany, and Great Britain. Later, in the 1920s and 1930s, the eugenic policy of sterilizing certain mental patients was implemented in other countries including Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Japan and Sweden.

Frederick Osborn's 1937 journal article "Development of a Eugenic Philosophy" framed eugenics as a social philosophy—a philosophy with implications for social order. That definition is not universally accepted. Osborn advocated for higher rates of sexual reproduction among people with desired traits ("positive eugenics") or reduced rates of sexual reproduction or sterilization of people with less-desired or undesired traits ("negative eugenics").

In addition to being practiced in a number of countries, eugenics was internationally organized through the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations. Its scientific aspects were carried on through research bodies such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, the Cold Spring Harbor Carnegie Institution for Experimental Evolution, and the Eugenics Record Office. Politically, the movement advocated measures such as sterilization laws. In its moral dimension, eugenics rejected the doctrine that all human beings are born equal and redefined moral worth purely in terms of genetic fitness. Its racist elements included pursuit of a pure "Nordic race" or "Aryan" genetic pool and the eventual elimination of "unfit" races.

Many leading British politicians subscribed to the theories of eugenics. Winston Churchill supported the British Eugenics Society and was an honorary vice president for the organization. Churchill believed that eugenics could solve "race deterioration" and reduce crime and poverty.

As a social movement, eugenics reached its greatest popularity in the early decades of the 20th century, when it was practiced around the world and promoted by governments, institutions, and influential individuals. Many countries enacted various eugenics policies, including: genetic screenings, birth control, promoting differential birth rates, marriage restrictions, segregation (both racial segregation and sequestering the mentally ill), compulsory sterilization, forced abortions or forced pregnancies, ultimately culminating in genocide. By 2014, gene selection (rather than "people selection") was made possible through advances in genome editing, leading to what is sometimes called new eugenics, also known as "neo-eugenics", "consumer eugenics", or "liberal eugenics"; which focuses on individual freedom and allegedly pulls away from racism, sexism or a focus on intelligence.

Early opposition
Early critics of the philosophy of eugenics included the American sociologist Lester Frank Ward, the English writer G. K. Chesterton, and Scottish tuberculosis pioneer and author Halliday Sutherland. Ward's 1913 article "Eugenics, Euthenics, and Eudemics", Chesterton's 1917 book Eugenics and Other Evils, and Franz Boas' 1916 article "Eugenics" (published in The Scientific Monthly) were all harshly critical of the rapidly growing movement.

Several biologists were also antagonistic to the eugenics movement, including Lancelot Hogben. Other biologists who were themselves eugenicists, such as J. B. S. Haldane and R. A. Fisher, however, also expressed skepticism in the belief that sterilization of "defectives" (i.e. a purely negative eugenics) would lead to the disappearance of undesirable genetic traits.

Among institutions, the Catholic Church was an opponent of state-enforced sterilizations, but accepted isolating people with hereditary diseases so as not to let them reproduce. Attempts by the Eugenics Education Society to persuade the British government to legalize voluntary sterilization were opposed by Catholics and by the Labour Party. The American Eugenics Society initially gained some Catholic supporters, but Catholic support declined following the 1930 papal encyclical Casti connubii. In this, Pope Pius XI explicitly condemned sterilization laws: "Public magistrates have no direct power over the bodies of their subjects; therefore, where no crime has taken place and there is no cause present for grave punishment, they can never directly harm, or tamper with the integrity of the body, either for the reasons of eugenics or for any other reason."

In fact, more generally, "[m]uch of the opposition to eugenics during that era, at least in Europe, came from the right." The eugenicists' political successes in Germany and Scandinavia were not at all matched in such countries as Poland and Czechoslovakia, even though measures had been proposed there, largely because of the Catholic church's moderating influence.

Nazism and the decline of eugenics
The scientific reputation of eugenics started to decline in the 1930s, a time when Ernst Rüdin used eugenics as a justification for the racial policies of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler had praised and incorporated eugenic ideas in Mein Kampf in 1925 and emulated eugenic legislation for the sterilization of "defectives" that had been pioneered in the United States once he took power. Some common early 20th century eugenics methods involved identifying and classifying individuals and their families, including the poor, mentally ill, blind, deaf, developmentally disabled, promiscuous women, homosexuals, and racial groups (such as the Roma and Jews in Nazi Germany) as "degenerate" or "unfit", and therefore led to segregation, institutionalization, sterilization, and even mass murder. The Nazi policy of identifying German citizens deemed mentally or physically unfit and then systematically killing them with poison gas, referred to as the Aktion T4 campaign, is understood by historians to have paved the way for the Holocaust.

By the end of World War II, many eugenics laws were abandoned, having become associated with Nazi Germany. H. G. Wells, who had called for "the sterilization of failures" in 1904, stated in his 1940 book The Rights of Man: Or What Are We Fighting For? that among the human rights, which he believed should be available to all people, was "a prohibition on mutilation, sterilization, torture, and any bodily punishment". After World War II, the practice of "imposing measures intended to prevent births within [a national, ethnical, racial or religious] group" fell within the definition of the new international crime of genocide, set out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union also proclaims "the prohibition of eugenic practices, in particular those aiming at selection of persons".

Modern eugenics
Developments in genetic, genomic, and reproductive technologies at the beginning of the 21st century have raised numerous questions regarding the ethical status of eugenics, effectively creating a resurgence of interest in the subject. Some, such as UC Berkeley sociologist Troy Duster, have argued that modern genetics is a back door to eugenics. This view was shared by then-White House Assistant Director for Forensic Sciences, Tania Simoncelli, who stated in a 2003 publication by the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College that advances in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) are moving society to a "new era of eugenics", and that, unlike the Nazi eugenics, modern eugenics is consumer driven and market based, "where children are increasingly regarded as made-to-order consumer products". In a similar spirit, the United Nations' International Bioethics Committee wrote that the ethical problems of human genetic engineering should not be confused with the ethical problems of the 20th century eugenics movements. However, it is still problematic because it challenges the idea of human equality and opens up new forms of discrimination and stigmatization for those who do not want, or cannot afford, the technology. Before any of these technological breakthroughs, however, prenatal screening has long been called by some a contemporary and highly prevalent form of eugenics because it may lead to selective abortions of fetuses with undesirable traits.

In Singapore
Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, actively promoted eugenics as late as 1983. In 1984, Singapore began providing financial incentives to highly educated women to encourage them to have more children. For this purpose was introduced the "Graduate Mother Scheme" that incentivized graduate women to get married as much as the rest of their populace. The incentives were extremely unpopular and regarded as eugenic, and were seen as discriminatory towards Singapore's non-Chinese ethnic population. In 1985, the incentives were partly abandoned as ineffective, while the government matchmaking agency, the Social Development Network, remains active.

Contested scientific status

One general concern that many bring to the table, is that the reduced genetic diversity some argue to be a likely feature of long-term, species-wide eugenics plans, could eventually result in inbreeding depression, increased spread of infectious disease, and decreased resilience to changes in the environment.

Arguments for scientific validity
In his original lecture "Darwinism, Medical Progress and Eugenics", Karl Pearson claimed that everything concerning eugenics fell into the field of medicine. Similarly apologetic, Czech-American Aleš Hrdlička, head of the American Anthropological Association from 1925 to 1926 and "perhaps the leading physical anthropologist in the country at the time" posited that its' ultimate aim "is that it may, on the basis of accumulated knowledge and together with other branches of research, show the tendencies of the actual and future evolution of man, and aid in its possible regulation or improvement. The growing science of eugenics will essentially become applied anthropology."

More recently, prominent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins stated of the matter:"The spectre of Hitler has led some scientists to stray from 'ought' to 'is' and deny that breeding for human qualities is even possible. But if you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability? Objections such as 'these are not one-dimensional abilities' apply equally to cows, horses and dogs and never stopped anybody in practice. I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler's death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons."

Scientifically possible and already well-established, heterozygote carrier testing is used in the prevention of autosomal recessive disorders, allowing couples to determine if they are at risk of passing various hereditary defects onto a future child. There are various examples of eugenic acts that managed to lower the prevalence of recessive diseases, although not negatively affecting the heterozygote carriers of those diseases themselves. The elevated prevalence of various genetically transmitted diseases among Ashkenazi Jew populations (e.g. per Tay–Sachs, cystic fibrosis, Canavan's disease and Gaucher's disease), has been markedly decreased in more recent cohorts by the widespread adoption of genetic screening (cf. also Dor Yeshorim).

Objections to scientific validity
Amanda Caleb, Professor of Medical Humanities at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, says "Eugenic laws and policies are now understood as part of a specious devotion to a pseudoscience that actively dehumanizes to support political agendas and not true science or medicine."

The first major challenge to conventional eugenics based on genetic inheritance was made in 1915 by Thomas Hunt Morgan. He demonstrated the event of genetic mutation occurring outside of inheritance involving the discovery of the hatching of a fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) with white eyes from a family with red eyes, demonstrating that major genetic changes occurred outside of inheritance. Additionally, Morgan criticized the view that certain traits, such as intelligence and criminality, were hereditary because these traits were subjective.

Pleiotropy occurs when one gene influences multiple, seemingly unrelated phenotypic traits, an example being phenylketonuria, which is a human disease that affects multiple systems but is caused by one gene defect. Andrzej Pękalski, from the University of Wroclaw, argues that eugenics can cause harmful loss of genetic diversity if a eugenics program selects a pleiotropic gene that could possibly be associated with a positive trait. Pękalski uses the example of a coercive government eugenics program that prohibits people with myopia from breeding but has the unintended consequence of also selecting against high intelligence since the two go together.

While the science of genetics has increasingly provided means by which certain characteristics and conditions can be identified and understood, given the complexity of human genetics, culture, and psychology, at this point there is no agreed objective means of determining which traits might be ultimately desirable or undesirable. Some conditions such as sickle-cell disease and cystic fibrosis respectively confer immunity to malaria and resistance to cholera when a single copy of the recessive allele is contained within the genotype of the individual, so eliminating these genes is undesirable in places where such diseases are common. Such cases in which, furthermore, even individual organisms' massive suffering or even death due to the odd 25 percent of homozygotes ineliminable by natural section under a Mendelian pattern of inheritance may be justified for the greater ecological good that is conspecifics incur a greater so-called heterozygote advantage in turn.

Edwin Black, journalist, historian, and author of War Against the Weak, argues that eugenics is often deemed a pseudoscience because what is defined as a genetic improvement of a desired trait is a cultural choice rather than a matter that can be determined through objective scientific inquiry. Indeed, the most disputed aspect of eugenics has been the definition of "improvement" of the human gene pool, such as what is a beneficial characteristic and what is a defect. Historically, this aspect of eugenics is often considered to be tainted with scientific racism and pseudoscience. Regarding the lasting controversy above, himself citing recent scholarship, historian of science Aaron Gillette notes that: "Others take a more nuanced view. They recognize that there was a wide variety of eugenic theories, some of which were much less race- or class-based than others. Eugenicists might also give greater or lesser acknowledgment to the role that environment played in shaping human behavior. In some cases, eugenics was almost imperceptibly intertwined with health care, child care, birth control, and sex education issues. In this sense, eugenics has been called, 'a 'modern' way of talking about social problems in biologizing terms'.'"

Indeed, granting that the historical phenomenon of eugenics was that of a pseudoscience, Gilette further notes that this derived chiefly from its being "an epiphenomenon of a number of sciences, which all intersected at the claim that it was possible to consciously guide human evolution."

Contemporary ethical opposition
In a book directly addressed at socialist eugenicist J.B.S. Haldane and his once-influential Daedalus, Betrand Russell, had one serious objection of his own: eugenic policies might simply end up being used to reproduce existing power relations “rather than to make men happy.”

Environmental ethicist Bill McKibben argued against germinal choice technology and other advanced biotechnological strategies for human enhancement. He writes that it would be morally wrong for humans to tamper with fundamental aspects of themselves (or their children) in an attempt to overcome universal human limitations, such as vulnerability to aging, maximum life span and biological constraints on physical and cognitive ability. Attempts to "improve" themselves through such manipulation would remove limitations that provide a necessary context for the experience of meaningful human choice. He claims that human lives would no longer seem meaningful in a world where such limitations could be overcome with technology. Even the goal of using germinal choice technology for clearly therapeutic purposes should be relinquished, he argues, since it would inevitably produce temptations to tamper with such things as cognitive capacities. He argues that it is possible for societies to benefit from renouncing particular technologies, using Ming China, Tokugawa Japan and the contemporary Amish as examples.

Contemporary ethical advocacy
Some, for example Nathaniel C. Comfort of Johns Hopkins University, claim that the change from state-led reproductive-genetic decision-making to individual choice has moderated the worst abuses of eugenics by transferring the decision-making process from the state to patients and their families. Comfort suggests that "the eugenic impulse drives us to eliminate disease, live longer and healthier, with greater intelligence, and a better adjustment to the conditions of society; and the health benefits, the intellectual thrill and the profits of genetic bio-medicine are too great for us to do otherwise." Others, such as bioethicist Stephen Wilkinson of Keele University and Honorary Research Fellow Eve Garrard at the University of Manchester, claim that some aspects of modern genetics can be classified as eugenics, but that this classification does not inherently make modern genetics immoral.

In their book published in 2000, From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice, bioethicists Allen Buchanan, Dan Brock, Norman Daniels and Daniel Wikler argued that liberal societies have an obligation to encourage as wide an adoption of eugenic enhancement technologies as possible (so long as such policies do not infringe on individuals' reproductive rights or exert undue pressures on prospective parents to use these technologies) in order to maximize public health and minimize the inequalities that may result from both natural genetic endowments and unequal access to genetic enhancements.

In his book A Theory of Justice (1971), American philosopher John Rawls argued that "[o]ver time a society is to take steps to preserve the general level of natural abilities and to prevent the diffusion of serious defects". The original position, a hypothetical situation developed by Rawls, has been used as an argument for negative eugenics. Accordingly, some morally support germline editing precisely because of its capacity to (re)distribute such Rawlsian primary goods.

In science fiction
The novel Brave New World by the English author Aldous Huxley (1931), is a dystopian social science fiction novel which is set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy.

Various works by the author Robert A. Heinlein mention the Howard Foundation, a group which attempts to improve human longevity through selective breeding.

Among Frank Herbert's other works, the Dune series, starting with the eponymous 1965 novel, describes selective breeding by a powerful sisterhood, the Bene Gesserit, to produce a supernormal male being, the Kwisatz Haderach.

The Star Trek franchise features a race of genetically engineered humans which is known as "Augments", the most notable of them is Khan Noonien Singh. These "supermen" were the cause of the Eugenics Wars, a dark period in Earth's fictional history, before they were deposed and exiled. They appear in many of the franchise's story arcs, most frequently, they appear as villains.

The film Gattaca (1997) provides a fictional example of a dystopian society that uses eugenics to decide what people are capable of and what their place in the world is. The title alluding to the letters G, A, T and C, the four nucleobases of DNA, and depicts the possible consequences of genetic discrimination in the present societal framework. Relegated to the role of a cleaner owing to his genetically projected death at age 30,2 years due to a heart condition (being told: "The only way you'll see the inside of a spaceship is if you were cleaning it”), the protagonist observes enhanced astronauts as they are demonstrating their superhuman athleticism. Nonetheless, against mere uniformity being the movies key theme, it may be highlighted that it also includes a twelve fingered concert pianist nonetheless taken to be highly esteemed. Even though it was not a box office success, it was critically acclaimed and it is said to have crystallized the debate over human genetic engineering in the public consciousness.  As to its accuracy, its production company, Sony Pictures, consulted with a gene therapy researcher and prominent critic of eugenics known to have stated that "[w]e should not step over the line that delineates treatment from enhancement", W. French Anderson, to ensure that the portrayal of science was realistic. Disputing their sucess in this mission, Philim Yam of Scientific American called the film "science bashing" and Nature's Kevin Davies called it a "surprisingly pedestrian affair", while molecular biologist Lee Silver described its extreme determinism as "a straw man". In an even more pointed critique, in his 2018 book Blueprint, the behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin writes that while Gattaca warned of the dangers of genetic information being used by a totalitarian state, genetic testing could also favor better meritocracy in democratic societies which already administer a variety of standardized tests to select people for education and employment. He suggests that polygenic scores might supplement testing in a manner that is essentially free of biases. Along similar lines, in the 2004 book Citizen Cyborg, democratic transhumanist James Hughes had already argued against what he considers to be "professional fear-mongers", stating of the movie's premises:
 * 1) Astronaut training programs are entirely justified in attempting to screen out people with heart problems for safety reasons;
 * 2) In the United States, people are already being screened by insurance companies on the basis of their propensities to disease, for actuarial purposes;
 * 3) Rather than banning genetic testing or genetic enhancement, society should simply develop genetic information privacy laws, such as the U.S. Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, that allow justified forms of genetic testing and data aggregation, but forbid those that are judged to result in genetic discrimination. Enforcing these would not be very hard once a system for reporting and penalties is in place.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Eugenics


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Email

Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving messages using electronic devices. It was conceived in the late–20th century as the digital version of, or counterpart to, mail (hence e- + mail). Email is a ubiquitous and very widely used communication medium; in current use, an email address is often treated as a basic and necessary part of many processes in business, commerce, government, education, entertainment, and other spheres of daily life in most countries.

Email operates across computer networks, primarily the Internet, and also local area networks. Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages. Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need to connect, typically to a mail server or a webmail interface to send or receive messages or download it.

Originally an ASCII text-only communications medium, Internet email was extended by Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) to carry text in other character sets and multimedia content attachments. International email, with internationalized email addresses using UTF-8, is standardized but not widely adopted.

Terminology
The term electronic mail has been in use with its modern meaning since 1975, and variations of the shorter E-mail have been in use since 1979:

 * email is now the common form, and recommended by style guides. It is the form required by IETF Requests for Comments (RFC) and working groups. This spelling also appears in most dictionaries.
 * e-mail is the form favored in edited published American English and British English writing as reflected in the Corpus of Contemporary American English data, but is falling out of favor in some style guides.
 * E-mail is sometimes used. The original usage in June 1979 occurred in the journal Electronics in reference to the United States Postal Service initiative called E-COM, which was developed in the late 1970s and operated in the early 1980s.
 * Email is also used.
 * EMAIL was used by CompuServe starting in April 1981, which popularized the term.
 * EMail is a traditional form used in RFCs for the "Author's Address".

The service is often simply referred to as mail, and a single piece of electronic mail is called a message. The conventions for fields within emails—the "To", "From", "CC", "BCC" etc.—began with RFC-680 in 1975.

An Internet email consists of an envelope and content; the content consists of a header and a body.

History
Computer-based messaging between users of the same system became possible after the advent of time-sharing in the early 1960s, with a notable implementation by MIT's CTSS project in 1965. Most developers of early mainframes and minicomputers developed similar, but generally incompatible, mail applications. In 1971 the first ARPANET network mail was sent, introducing the now-familiar address syntax with the '@' symbol designating the user's system address. Over a series of RFCs, conventions were refined for sending mail messages over the File Transfer Protocol.

Proprietary electronic mail systems soon began to emerge. IBM, CompuServe and Xerox used in-house mail systems in the 1970s; CompuServe sold a commercial intraoffice mail product in 1978 to IBM and to Xerox from 1981. DEC's ALL-IN-1 and Hewlett-Packard's HPMAIL (later HP DeskManager) were released in 1982; development work on the former began in the late 1970s and the latter became the world's largest selling email system.

The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) was implemented on the ARPANET in 1983. LAN email systems emerged in the mid 1980s. For a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed likely that either a proprietary commercial system or the X.400 email system, part of the Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile (GOSIP), would predominate. However, once the final restrictions on carrying commercial traffic over the Internet ended in 1995, a combination of factors made the current Internet suite of SMTP, POP3 and IMAP email protocols the standard (see Protocol Wars).

Operation
The following is a typical sequence of events that takes place when sender Alice transmits a message using a mail user agent (MUA) addressed to the email address of the recipient.

 * 1) The MUA formats the message in email format and uses the submission protocol, a profile of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), to send the message content to the local mail submission agent (MSA), in this case smtp.a.org.
 * 2) The MSA determines the destination address provided in the SMTP protocol (not from the message header)—in this case, bob@b.org—which is a fully qualified domain address (FQDA). The part before the @ sign is the local part of the address, often the username of the recipient, and the part after the @ sign is a domain name. The MSA resolves a domain name to determine the fully qualified domain name of the mail server in the Domain Name System (DNS).
 * 3) The DNS server for the domain b.org (ns.b.org) responds with any MX records listing the mail exchange servers for that domain, in this case mx.b.org, a message transfer agent (MTA) server run by the recipient's ISP.
 * 4) smtp.a.org sends the message to mx.b.org using SMTP. This server may need to forward the message to other MTAs before the message reaches the final message delivery agent (MDA).
 * 5) The MDA delivers it to the mailbox of user bob.
 * 6) Bob's MUA picks up the message using either the Post Office Protocol (POP3) or the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP).

In addition to this example, alternatives and complications exist in the email system:
 * Alice or Bob may use a client connected to a corporate email system, such as IBM Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange. These systems often have their own internal email format and their clients typically communicate with the email server using a vendor-specific, proprietary protocol. The server sends or receives email via the Internet through the product's Internet mail gateway which also does any necessary reformatting. If Alice and Bob work for the same company, the entire transaction may happen completely within a single corporate email system.
 * Alice may not have an MUA on her computer but instead may connect to a webmail service.
 * Alice's computer may run its own MTA, so avoiding the transfer at step 1.
 * Bob may pick up his email in many ways, for example logging into mx.b.org and reading it directly, or by using a webmail service.
 * Domains usually have several mail exchange servers so that they can continue to accept mail even if the primary is not available.

Many MTAs used to accept messages for any recipient on the Internet and do their best to deliver them. Such MTAs are called open mail relays. This was very important in the early days of the Internet when network connections were unreliable. However, this mechanism proved to be exploitable by originators of unsolicited bulk email and as a consequence open mail relays have become rare, and many MTAs do not accept messages from open mail relays.

Message format
The basic Internet message format used for email is defined by, with encoding of non-ASCII data and multimedia content attachments defined in RFC 2045 through RFC 2049, collectively called Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions or MIME. The extensions in International email apply only to email. RFC 5322 replaced the earlier RFC 2822 in 2008, then RFC 2822 in 2001 replaced RFC 822 – the standard for Internet email for decades. Published in 1982, RFC 822 was based on the earlier RFC 733 for the ARPANET.

Internet email messages consist of two sections, "header" and "body". These are known as "content". The header is structured into fields such as From, To, CC, Subject, Date, and other information about the email. In the process of transporting email messages between systems, SMTP communicates delivery parameters and information using message header fields. The body contains the message, as unstructured text, sometimes containing a signature block at the end. The header is separated from the body by a blank line.

Message header
RFC 5322 specifies the syntax of the email header. Each email message has a header (the "header section" of the message, according to the specification), comprising a number of fields ("header fields"). Each field has a name ("field name" or "header field name"), followed by the separator character ":", and a value ("field body" or "header field body").

Each field name begins in the first character of a new line in the header section, and begins with a non-whitespace printable character. It ends with the separator character ":". The separator is followed by the field value (the "field body"). The value can continue onto subsequent lines if those lines have space or tab as their first character. Field names and, without SMTPUTF8, field bodies are restricted to 7-bit ASCII characters. Some non-ASCII values may be represented using MIME encoded words.

Header fields
Email header fields can be multi-line, with each line recommended to be no more than 78 characters, although the limit is 998 characters. Header fields defined by RFC 5322 contain only US-ASCII characters; for encoding characters in other sets, a syntax specified in RFC 2047 may be used. In some examples, the IETF EAI working group defines some standards track extensions, replacing previous experimental extensions so UTF-8 encoded Unicode characters may be used within the header. In particular, this allows email addresses to use non-ASCII characters. Such addresses are supported by Google and Microsoft products, and promoted by some government agents.

The message header must include at least the following fields:
 * From: The email address, and, optionally, the name of the author(s). Some email clients are changeable through account settings.
 * Date: The local time and date the message was written. Like the From: field, many email clients fill this in automatically before sending. The recipient's client may display the time in the format and time zone local to them.

RFC 3864 describes registration procedures for message header fields at the IANA; it provides for permanent and provisional field names, including also fields defined for MIME, netnews, and HTTP, and referencing relevant RFCs. Common header fields for email include:

 * To: The email address(es), and optionally name(s) of the message's recipient(s). Indicates primary recipients (multiple allowed), for secondary recipients see Cc: and Bcc: below.
 * Subject: A brief summary of the topic of the message. Certain abbreviations are commonly used in the subject, including "RE:" and "FW:".
 * Cc: Carbon copy; Many email clients mark email in one's inbox differently depending on whether they are in the To: or Cc: list.
 * Bcc: Blind carbon copy; addresses are usually only specified during SMTP delivery, and not usually listed in the message header.
 * Content-Type: Information about how the message is to be displayed, usually a MIME type.
 * Precedence: commonly with values "bulk", "junk", or "list"; used to indicate automated "vacation" or "out of office" responses should not be returned for this mail, e.g. to prevent vacation notices from sent to all other subscribers of a mailing list. Sendmail uses this field to affect prioritization of queued email, with "Precedence: special-delivery" messages delivered sooner. With modern high-bandwidth networks, delivery priority is less of an issue than it was. Microsoft Exchange respects a fine-grained automatic response suppression mechanism, the X-Auto-Response-Suppress field.
 * Message-ID: Also an automatic-generated field to prevent multiple deliveries and for reference in In-Reply-To: (see below).
 * In-Reply-To: Message-ID of the message this is a reply to. Used to link related messages together. This field only applies to reply messages.
 * List-Unsubscribe: HTTP link to unsubscribe from a mailing list.
 * References: Message-ID of the message this is a reply to, and the message-id of the message the previous reply was a reply to, etc.
 * Reply-To: Address should be used to reply to the message.
 * Sender: Address of the sender acting on behalf of the author listed in the From: field (secretary, list manager, etc.).
 * Archived-At: A direct link to the archived form of an individual email message.

The To: field may be unrelated to the addresses to which the message is delivered. The delivery list is supplied separately to the transport protocol, SMTP, which may be extracted from the header content. The "To:" field is similar to the addressing at the top of a conventional letter delivered according to the address on the outer envelope. In the same way, the "From:" field may not be the sender. Some mail servers apply email authentication systems to messages relayed. Data pertaining to the server's activity is also part of the header, as defined below.

SMTP defines the trace information of a message saved in the header using the following two fields:
 * Received: after an SMTP server accepts a message, it inserts this trace record at the top of the header (last to first).
 * Return-Path: after the delivery SMTP server makes the final delivery of a message, it inserts this field at the top of the header.

Other fields added on top of the header by the receiving server may be called trace fields.
 * Authentication-Results: after a server verifies authentication, it can save the results in this field for consumption by downstream agents.
 * Received-SPF: stores results of SPF checks in more detail than Authentication-Results.
 * DKIM-Signature: stores results of DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) decryption to verify the message was not changed after it was sent.
 * Auto-Submitted: is used to mark automatic-generated messages.
 * VBR-Info: claims VBR whitelisting

Content encoding
Internet email was designed for 7-bit ASCII. Most email software is 8-bit clean, but must assume it will communicate with 7-bit servers and mail readers. The MIME standard introduced character set specifiers and two content transfer encodings to enable transmission of non-ASCII data: quoted printable for mostly 7-bit content with a few characters outside that range and base64 for arbitrary binary data. The 8BITMIME and BINARY extensions were introduced to allow transmission of mail without the need for these encodings, but many mail transport agents may not support them. In some countries, e-mail software violates by sending raw non-ASCII text and several encoding schemes co-exist; as a result, by default, the message in a non-Latin alphabet language appears in non-readable form (the only exception is a coincidence if the sender and receiver use the same encoding scheme). Therefore, for international character sets, Unicode is growing in popularity.

Plain text and HTML
Most modern graphic email clients allow the use of either plain text or HTML for the message body at the option of the user. HTML email messages often include an automatic-generated plain text copy for compatibility.

Advantages of HTML include the ability to include in-line links and images, set apart previous messages in block quotes, wrap naturally on any display, use emphasis such as underlines and italics, and change font styles. Disadvantages include the increased size of the email, privacy concerns about web bugs, abuse of HTML email as a vector for phishing attacks and the spread of malicious software. Some e-mail clients interpret the body as HTML even in the absence of a  header field; this may cause various problems.

Some web-based mailing lists recommend all posts be made in plain text, with 72 or 80 characters per line for all the above reasons, and because they have a significant number of readers using text-based email clients such as Mutt. Various informal conventions evolved for marking up plain text in email and usenet posts, which later led to the development of formal languages like setext (c. 1992) and many others, the most popular of them being markdown.

Some Microsoft email clients may allow rich formatting using their proprietary Rich Text Format (RTF), but this should be avoided unless the recipient is guaranteed to have a compatible email client.

Servers and client applications

Messages are exchanged between hosts using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol with software programs called mail transfer agents (MTAs); and delivered to a mail store by programs called mail delivery agents (MDAs, also sometimes called local delivery agents, LDAs). Accepting a message obliges an MTA to deliver it, and when a message cannot be delivered, that MTA must send a bounce message back to the sender, indicating the problem.

Users can retrieve their messages from servers using standard protocols such as POP or IMAP, or, as is more likely in a large corporate environment, with a proprietary protocol specific to Novell Groupwise, Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange Servers. Programs used by users for retrieving, reading, and managing email are called mail user agents (MUAs).

When opening an email, it is marked as "read", which typically visibly distinguishes it from "unread" messages on clients' user interfaces. Email clients may allow hiding read emails from the inbox so the user can focus on the unread.

Mail can be stored on the client, on the server side, or in both places. Standard formats for mailboxes include Maildir and mbox. Several prominent email clients use their own proprietary format and require conversion software to transfer email between them. Server-side storage is often in a proprietary format but since access is through a standard protocol such as IMAP, moving email from one server to another can be done with any MUA supporting the protocol.

Many current email users do not run MTA, MDA or MUA programs themselves, but use a web-based email platform, such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail, that performs the same tasks. Such webmail interfaces allow users to access their mail with any standard web browser, from any computer, rather than relying on a local email client.

Filename extensions
Upon reception of email messages, email client applications save messages in operating system files in the file system. Some clients save individual messages as separate files, while others use various database formats, often proprietary, for collective storage. A historical standard of storage is the mbox format. The specific format used is often indicated by special filename extensions:
 * Used by many email clients including Novell GroupWise, Microsoft Outlook Express, Lotus notes, Windows Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Postbox. The files contain the email contents as plain text in MIME format, containing the email header and body, including attachments in one or more of several formats.
 * Used by many email clients including Novell GroupWise, Microsoft Outlook Express, Lotus notes, Windows Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Postbox. The files contain the email contents as plain text in MIME format, containing the email header and body, including attachments in one or more of several formats.

 * Used by Apple Mail.
 * Used by Apple Mail.

 * Used by Microsoft Office Outlook and OfficeLogic Groupware.
 * Used by Microsoft Office Outlook and OfficeLogic Groupware.

 * Used by Opera Mail, KMail, and Apple Mail based on the mbox format.
 * Used by Opera Mail, KMail, and Apple Mail based on the mbox format.

Some applications (like Apple Mail) leave attachments encoded in messages for searching while also saving separate copies of the attachments. Others separate attachments from messages and save them in a specific directory.

URI scheme mailto
The URI scheme, as registered with the IANA, defines the  scheme for SMTP email addresses. Though its use is not strictly defined, URLs of this form are intended to be used to open the new message window of the user's mail client when the URL is activated, with the address as defined by the URL in the To: field. Many clients also support query string parameters for the other email fields, such as its subject line or carbon copy recipients.

Web-based email
Many email providers have a web-based email client. This allows users to log into the email account by using any compatible web browser to send and receive their email. Mail is typically not downloaded to the web client, so it cannot be read without a current Internet connection.

POP3 email servers
The Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) is a mail access protocol used by a client application to read messages from the mail server. Received messages are often deleted from the server. POP supports simple download-and-delete requirements for access to remote mailboxes (termed maildrop in the POP RFC's). POP3 allows downloading messages on a local computer and reading them even when offline.

IMAP email servers
The Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) provides features to manage a mailbox from multiple devices. Small portable devices like smartphones are increasingly used to check email while traveling and to make brief replies, larger devices with better keyboard access being used to reply at greater length. IMAP shows the headers of messages, the sender and the subject and the device needs to request to download specific messages. Usually, the mail is left in folders in the mail server.

MAPI email servers
Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) is used by Microsoft Outlook to communicate to Microsoft Exchange Server—and to a range of other email server products such as Axigen Mail Server, Kerio Connect, Scalix, Zimbra, HP OpenMail, IBM Lotus Notes, Zarafa, and Bynari where vendors have added MAPI support to allow their products to be accessed directly via Outlook.

Business and organizational use
Email has been widely accepted by businesses, governments and non-governmental organizations in the developed world, and it is one of the key parts of an 'e-revolution' in workplace communication (with the other key plank being widespread adoption of highspeed Internet). A sponsored 2010 study on workplace communication found 83% of U.S. knowledge workers felt email was critical to their success and productivity at work.

It has some key benefits to business and other organizations, including:
 * Facilitating logistics
 * Much of the business world relies on communications between people who are not physically in the same building, area, or even country; setting up and attending an in-person meeting, telephone call, or conference call can be inconvenient, time-consuming, and costly. Email provides a method of exchanging information between two or more people with no set-up costs and that is generally far less expensive than a physical meeting or phone call.

 * Helping with synchronization
 * With real time communication by meetings or phone calls, participants must work on the same schedule, and each participant must spend the same amount of time in the meeting or call. Email allows asynchrony: each participant may control their schedule independently. Batch processing of incoming emails can improve workflow compared to interrupting calls.

 * Reducing cost
 * Sending an email is much less expensive than sending postal mail, or long distance telephone calls, telex or telegrams.

 * Increasing speed
 * Much faster than most of the alternatives.

 * Creating a "written" record
 * Unlike a telephone or in-person conversation, email by its nature creates a detailed written record of the communication, the identity of the sender(s) and recipient(s) and the date and time the message was sent. In the event of a contract or legal dispute, saved emails can be used to prove that an individual was advised of certain issues, as each email has the date and time recorded on it.

 * Possibility of auto-processing and improved distribution
 * As well pre-processing of customer's orders or addressing the person in charge can be realized by automated procedures.

Email marketing
Email marketing via "opt-in" is often successfully used to send special sales offerings and new product information. Depending on the recipient's culture, email sent without permission—such as an "opt-in"—is likely to be viewed as unwelcome "email spam".

Personal computer
Many users access their personal emails from friends and family members using a personal computer in their house or apartment.

Mobile
Email has become used on smartphones and on all types of computers. Mobile "apps" for email increase accessibility to the medium for users who are out of their homes. While in the earliest years of email, users could only access email on desktop computers, in the 2010s, it is possible for users to check their email when they are away from home, whether they are across town or across the world. Alerts can also be sent to the smartphone or other devices to notify them immediately of new messages. This has given email the ability to be used for more frequent communication between users and allowed them to check their email and write messages throughout the day. , there were approximately 1.4 billion email users worldwide and 50 billion non-spam emails that were sent daily.

Individuals often check emails on smartphones for both personal and work-related messages. It was found that US adults check their email more than they browse the web or check their Facebook accounts, making email the most popular activity for users to do on their smartphones. 78% of the respondents in the study revealed that they check their email on their phone. It was also found that 30% of consumers use only their smartphone to check their email, and 91% were likely to check their email at least once per day on their smartphone. However, the percentage of consumers using email on a smartphone ranges and differs dramatically across different countries. For example, in comparison to 75% of those consumers in the US who used it, only 17% in India did.

Declining use among young people
, the number of Americans visiting email web sites had fallen 6 percent after peaking in November 2009. For persons 12 to 17, the number was down 18 percent. Young people preferred instant messaging, texting and social media. Technology writer Matt Richtel said in The New York Times that email was like the VCR, vinyl records and film cameras—no longer cool and something older people do.

A 2015 survey of Android users showed that persons 13 to 24 used messaging apps 3.5 times as much as those over 45, and were far less likely to use email.

Attachment size limitation
Email messages may have one or more attachments, which are additional files that are appended to the email. Typical attachments include Microsoft Word documents, PDF documents, and scanned images of paper documents. In principle, there is no technical restriction on the size or number of attachments. However, in practice, email clients, servers, and Internet service providers implement various limitations on the size of files, or complete email – typically to 25MB or less. Furthermore, due to technical reasons, attachment sizes as seen by these transport systems can differ from what the user sees, which can be confusing to senders when trying to assess whether they can safely send a file by email. Where larger files need to be shared, various file hosting services are available and commonly used.

Information overload
The ubiquity of email for knowledge workers and "white collar" employees has led to concerns that recipients face an "information overload" in dealing with increasing volumes of email. With the growth in mobile devices, by default employees may also receive work-related emails outside of their working day. This can lead to increased stress and decreased satisfaction with work. Some observers even argue it could have a significant negative economic effect, as efforts to read the many emails could reduce productivity.

Spam
Email "spam" is unsolicited bulk email. The low cost of sending such email meant that, by 2003, up to 30% of total email traffic was spam, and was threatening the usefulness of email as a practical tool. The US CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and similar laws elsewhere had some impact, and a number of effective anti-spam techniques now largely mitigate the impact of spam by filtering or rejecting it for most users, but the volume sent is still very high—and increasingly consists not of advertisements for products, but malicious content or links. In September 2017, for example, the proportion of spam to legitimate email rose to 59.56%. The percentage of spam email in 2021 is estimated to be 85%.

Malware
Emails are a major vector for the distribution of malware. This is often achieved by attaching malicious programs to the message and persuading potential victims to open the file. Types of malware distributed via email include computer worms and ransomware.

Email spoofing
Email spoofing occurs when the email message header is designed to make the message appear to come from a known or trusted source. Email spam and phishing methods typically use spoofing to mislead the recipient about the true message origin. Email spoofing may be done as a prank, or as part of a criminal effort to defraud an individual or organization. An example of a potentially fraudulent email spoofing is if an individual creates an email that appears to be an invoice from a major company, and then sends it to one or more recipients. In some cases, these fraudulent emails incorporate the logo of the purported organization and even the email address may appear legitimate.

Email bombing
Email bombing is the intentional sending of large volumes of messages to a target address. The overloading of the target email address can render it unusable and can even cause the mail server to crash.

Privacy concerns
Today it can be important to distinguish between the Internet and internal email systems. Internet email may travel and be stored on networks and computers without the sender's or the recipient's control. During the transit time it is possible that third parties read or even modify the content. Internal mail systems, in which the information never leaves the organizational network, may be more secure, although information technology personnel and others whose function may involve monitoring or managing may be accessing the email of other employees.

Email privacy, without some security precautions, can be compromised because:
 * email messages are generally not encrypted.
 * email messages have to go through intermediate computers before reaching their destination, meaning it is relatively easy for others to intercept and read messages.
 * many Internet Service Providers (ISP) store copies of email messages on their mail servers before they are delivered. The backups of these can remain for up to several months on their server, despite deletion from the mailbox.
 * the "Received:"-fields and other information in the email can often identify the sender, preventing anonymous communication.
 * web bugs invisibly embedded in HTML content can alert the sender of any email whenever an email is rendered as HTML (some e-mail clients do this when the user reads, or re-reads the e-mail) and from which IP address. It can also reveal whether an email was read on a smartphone or a PC, or Apple Mac device via the user agent string.

There are cryptography applications that can serve as a remedy to one or more of the above. For example, Virtual Private Networks or the Tor network can be used to encrypt traffic from the user machine to a safer network while GPG, PGP, SMEmail, or S/MIME can be used for end-to-end message encryption, and SMTP STARTTLS or SMTP over Transport Layer Security/Secure Sockets Layer can be used to encrypt communications for a single mail hop between the SMTP client and the SMTP server.

Additionally, many mail user agents do not protect logins and passwords, making them easy to intercept by an attacker. Encrypted authentication schemes such as SASL prevent this. Finally, the attached files share many of the same hazards as those found in peer-to-peer filesharing. Attached files may contain trojans or viruses.

Legal contracts
It is possible for an exchange of emails to form a binding contract, so users must be careful about what they send through email correspondence. A signature block on an email may be interpreted as satisfying a signature requirement for a contract.

Flaming
Flaming occurs when a person sends a message (or many messages) with angry or antagonistic content. The term is derived from the use of the word incendiary to describe particularly heated email discussions. The ease and impersonality of email communications mean that the social norms that encourage civility in person or via telephone do not exist and civility may be forgotten.

Email bankruptcy
Also known as "email fatigue", email bankruptcy is when a user ignores a large number of email messages after falling behind in reading and answering them. The reason for falling behind is often due to information overload and a general sense there is so much information that it is not possible to read it all. As a solution, people occasionally send a "boilerplate" message explaining that their email inbox is full, and that they are in the process of clearing out all the messages. Harvard University law professor Lawrence Lessig is credited with coining this term, but he may only have popularized it.

Internationalization
Originally Internet email was completely ASCII text-based. MIME now allows body content text and some header content text in international character sets, but other headers and email addresses using UTF-8, while standardized have yet to be widely adopted.

Tracking of sent mail
The original SMTP mail service provides limited mechanisms for tracking a transmitted message, and none for verifying that it has been delivered or read. It requires that each mail server must either deliver it onward or return a failure notice (bounce message), but both software bugs and system failures can cause messages to be lost. To remedy this, the IETF introduced Delivery Status Notifications (delivery receipts) and Message Disposition Notifications (return receipts); however, these are not universally deployed in production.

Many ISPs now deliberately disable non-delivery reports (NDRs) and delivery receipts due to the activities of spammers:
 * Delivery Reports can be used to verify whether an address exists and if so, this indicates to a spammer that it is available to be spammed.
 * If the spammer uses a forged sender email address (email spoofing), then the innocent email address that was used can be flooded with NDRs from the many invalid email addresses the spammer may have attempted to mail. These NDRs then constitute spam from the ISP to the innocent user.

In the absence of standard methods, a range of system based around the use of web bugs have been developed. However, these are often seen as underhand or raising privacy concerns, and only work with email clients that support rendering of HTML. Many mail clients now default to not showing "web content". Webmail providers can also disrupt web bugs by pre-caching images.

title: Email


text:
Emoticon

An emoticon (,, rarely , ),   short for emotion icon, is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers, and letters—to express a person's feelings, mood, or reaction, without needing to describe it in detail.

The first ASCII emoticons are generally credited to computer scientist Scott Fahlman, who proposed what came to be known as "smileys" and in a message on the bulletin board system (BBS) of Carnegie Mellon University in 1982. In Western countries, emoticons are usually written at a right angle to the direction of the text. Users from Japan popularized a kind of emoticon called kaomoji, utilizing the larger character sets required for Japanese, that can be understood without tilting one's head to the left. This style arose on ASCII NET of Japan in 1986. Regardless of the character set used they are also known as verticons (from vertical icon).

As SMS mobile text messaging and the Internet became widespread in the late 1990s, emoticons became increasingly popular and were commonly used in texting, Internet forums, and e-mails. Emoticons have played a significant role in communication through technology, and some devices and applications have provided stylized pictures that do not use text punctuation. They offer another range of "tone" and feeling through texting that portrays specific emotions through facial gestures while in the midst of text-based cyber communication. Emoticons were the precursors to modern emojis, which have been in a state of continuous development for a variety of digital platforms. Today, over 90% of the world's online population uses emojis or emoticons.

Different uses of text characters (pre-1981)

Modern emoticons were not the first instances of :) or :-) being used in text. In 1648, poet Robert Herrick wrote, "Tumble me down, and I will sit Upon my ruins, (smiling yet:)." Herrick's work predated any other recorded use of brackets as a smiling face by around 200 years. However, experts doubted the inclusion of the colon in the poem was deliberate and if it was meant to represent a smiling face. English professor Alan Jacobs argued that "punctuation, in general, was unsettled in the seventeenth century ... Herrick was unlikely to have consistent punctuational practices himself, and even if he did he couldn't expect either his printers or his readers to share them." Indeed, 17th century typography practice often placed colons and semicolons within parentheses, including 14 instances of :) in Richard Baxter's 1653 Plain Scripture Proof of Infants Church-membership and Baptism.

Precursors to modern emoticons have existed since the 19th century. The National Telegraphic Review and Operators Guide in April 1857 documented the use of the number 73 in Morse code to express "love and kisses" (later reduced to the more formal "best regards"). Dodge's Manual in 1908 documented the reintroduction of "love and kisses" as the number 88. New Zealand academics Joan Gajadhar and John Green comment that both Morse code abbreviations are more succinct than modern abbreviations such as LOL.

The transcript of one of Abraham Lincoln's speeches in 1862 recorded the audience's reaction as: "(applause and laughter ;)". There has been some debate whether the glyph in Lincoln's speech was a typo, a legitimate punctuation construct, or the first emoticon. Linguist Philip Seargeant argues that it was a simple typesetting error.

Before March 1881 the examples of "typographical art" appeared in at least three newspaper articles, including Kurjer warszawski (published in Warsaw) from 5 March 1881, using punctuation to represent the emotions of joy, melancholy, indifference, and astonishment.

In a 1912 essay titled "For Brevity and Clarity", American author Ambrose Bierce suggested facetiously that a bracket could be used to represent a smiling face, proposing "an improvement in punctuation" with which writers could convey cachinnation, loud or immoderate laughter: "it is written thus ‿ and presents a smiling mouth. It is to be appended, with the full stop, to every jocular or ironical sentence". In a 1936 Harvard Lampoon article, writer Alan Gregg proposed combining brackets with various other punctuation marks to represent various moods. Brackets were used for the sides of the mouth or cheeks, with other punctuation used between the brackets to display various emotions: (-) for a smile, (--) (showing more "teeth") for laughter, (#) for a frown and (*) for a wink.

An instance of text characters representing a sideways smiling and frowning face could be found in the New York Herald Tribune on 10 March 1953 promoting the film Lili starring Leslie Caron.

The September 1962 issue of MAD magazine included an article titled "Typewri-toons". The piece, featuring typewriter-generated artwork credited to "Royal Portable", was entirely made up of repurposed typography, including a capital letter P having a bigger bust than a capital I, a lowercase b and d discussing their pregnancies, an asterisk on top of a letter to indicate the letter had just come inside from snowfall, and a classroom of lowercase n's interrupted by a lowercase h "raising its hand".

A further example attributed to a Baltimore Sunday Sun columnist appeared in a 1967 article in Reader's Digest, using a dash and right bracket to represent a tongue in one's cheek: —). Prefiguring the modern "smiley" emoticon, writer Vladimir Nabokov told an interviewer from The New York Times in 1969, "I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smilesome sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question."

In the 1970s, the PLATO IV computer system was launched. It was one of the first computers used throughout educational and professional institutions, but rarely used in a residential setting. On the computer system, a student at the University of Illinois developed pictograms that resembled different smiling faces. Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope stated this likely took place in 1972, and they claimed these to be the first emoticons. The student's creations likely cover multiple timelines, the creation of computer icons, digital pictograms and emoticons. Since the pictograms were not focused on offering a means to communicate, they are not generally considered important in the history of the emoticon.

ASCII emoticons use in digital communication (1982–mid-1990s)
Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Scott Fahlman is generally credited with the invention of the digital text-based emoticon in 1982. Carnegie Mellon's bulletin board system (BBS) was a forum used by students and teachers for discussing a variety of topics, where jokes often created misunderstandings. As a response to the difficulty of conveying humor or sarcasm in plain text, Fahlman proposed colon–hyphen–right bracket :-) as a label for "attempted humor". The use of ASCII symbols, a standard set of codes representing typographical marks, was essential to allow the symbols to be displayed on any computer. Fahlman sent the following message after an incident where a humorous warning about a mercury spill in an elevator was misunderstood as serious:

 19-Sep-82 11:44   Scott E  Fahlman             :-) From: Scott E  Fahlman  I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

Other suggestions on the forum included an asterisk * and an ampersand &, the latter meant to represent a person doubled over in laughter, as well as a percent sign % and a pound sign #. Within a few months, the smiley had spread to the ARPANET and Usenet.

Many of those that pre-dated Fahlman either drew faces using alphabetic symbols or created digital pictograms. Scott Fahlman took it a step further, by suggesting that not only could his emoticon communication emotion, but also replace language. Using the emoticons as a form of communication is why Fahlman is seen as the creator of emoticons vs. other earlier claims.

Since the 1990s, emoticons (colon, hyphen and bracket) have become integral to digital communications, and have inspired a variety of other emoticons, including the "winking" face using a semicolon ;-), the "surprised" face with a letter o in place of a bracket :-o, and XD, a visual representation of the Face with Tears of Joy emoji or the acronym LOL.

In 1996, The Smiley Company was established by Nicolas Loufrani and his father Franklin as a way of commercializing the smiley trademark. As part of this, The Smiley Dictionary website focused on ASCII emoticons, where a catalogue was made of them. Hundreds of these basic designs had not been documented in one place, such as :-). Many other people did similar to Loufrani from 1995 onwards, including David Sanderson creating the book Smileys in 1997. James Marshall also hosted an online collection of ASCII emoticons which he completed in 2008. Loufrani's catalogue sorted the ASCII emoticons into 11 different categories, with designs that were more widespread than just representing human emotion.

A researcher at Stanford University surveyed the emoticons used in four million Twitter messages and found that the smiling emoticon without a hyphen "nose" :) was much more common than the original version with the hyphen :-). Linguist Vyvyan Evans argues that this represents a shift in usage by younger users as a form of covert prestige: rejecting a standard usage in order to demonstrate in-group membership.

Graphical emoticons and other developments (1990s–present)
Loufrani went a step further than ASCII emoticons, when he began to use the basic text designs and turned them into graphical representations. Today, they are known as graphical emoticons. His designs based on a newly reinvented 3D Smiley logo were registered at the United States Copyright Office in 1997 and appeared online as .gif files in 1998. For ASCII emoticons that did not exist to convert into graphical form, Loufrani also backward engineered new ASCII emoticons from the graphical versions he created. These were the first graphical representations of ASCII emoticons. He published his Smiley icons as well as emoticons created by others, along with their ASCII versions, in an online Smiley Dictionary in 2001. This dictionary included 640 different smiley icons and was published as a book called Dico Smileys in 2002. In 2017, British magazine The Drum referred to Loufrani as the "godfather of the emoji" for his work in the field.

Fahlman has stated that he sees emojis as "the remote descendants of this thing I did."

On September 23, 2021, it was announced that Scott Fahlman was holding an auction for the original emoticons he created in 1982. The auction was held in Dallas, United States, and sold the two designs as non-fungible tokens (NFT). The online auction ended later that month, with the originals selling for $237,500.

In some programming languages, certain operators are known informally by their emoticon-like appearance. This includes the Spaceship operator  (a comparison), Diamond operator   (for type hinting) and Elvis operator   (a shortened ternary operator).

Western
Usually, emoticons in Western style have the eyes on the left, followed by the nose and the mouth. The two-character version  which omits the nose is also very popular.

The most basic emoticons are relatively consistent in form, but each of them can be transformed by being rotated (making them tiny ambigrams), with or without a hyphen (nose). There are also some possible variations to emoticons to get new definitions, like changing a character to express a new feeling, or slightly change the mood of the emoticon. For example, equals sad and  equals very sad. Weeping can be written as. A blush can be expressed as. Others include wink, a grin  , and smug , and can be used to denote a flirting or joking tone, or may be implying a second meaning in the sentence preceding it. , such as when blowing a raspberry. An often used combination is also  for a heart, and   for a broken heart. is also sometimes used to depict shock. is used to depict melancholy, disappointment, or disapproval. is used to depict a neutral face.

A broad grin is sometimes shown with crinkled eyes to express further amusement;  and the addition of further "D" letters can suggest laughter or extreme amusement e.g.  . The same is true for   but the "3" represents an animal's mouth. There are other variations including for anger, or   for an evil grin, which can be, again, used in reverse, for an unhappy angry face, in the shape of .   for vampire teeth,   for grimace, and   tongue out, can be used to denote a flirting or joking tone, or may be implying a second meaning in the sentence preceding it.

As computers offer increasing built-in support for non-Western writing systems, it has become possible to use other glyphs to build emoticons. The 'shrug' emoticon,, uses the glyph ツ from the Japanese katakana writing system.

An equal sign is often used for the eyes in place of the colon, seen as, without changing the meaning of the emoticon. In these instances, the hyphen is almost always either omitted or, occasionally, replaced with an "o" as in. In most circles it has become acceptable to omit the hyphen, whether a colon or an equal sign is used for the eyes, but in some areas of usage people still prefer the larger, more traditional emoticon  or. One linguistic study has indicated that the use of a nose in an emoticon may be related to the user's age, with younger people less likely to use a nose. Similar-looking characters are commonly substituted for one another: for instance,,  , and   can all be used interchangeably, sometimes for subtly different effect or, in some cases, one type of character may look better in a certain font and therefore be preferred over another. It is also common for the user to replace the rounded brackets used for the mouth with other, similar brackets, such as  instead of.

Some variants are also more common in certain countries due to keyboard layouts. For example, the smiley  may occur in Scandinavia, where the keys for   and   are placed right beside each other. However, the  variant is without a doubt the dominant one in Scandinavia, making the   version a rarity. Diacritical marks are sometimes used. The letters  and   can be seen as an emoticon, as the upright version of   (meaning that one is surprised) and   (meaning that one is very happy) respectively.

Some emoticons may be read right to left instead, and in fact, can only be written using standard ASCII keyboard characters this way round; for example  which refers to being shocked or anxious, opposite to the large grin of.

In countries where the Cyrillic alphabet is used, the right parenthesis  is used as a smiley. Multiple parentheses  are used to express greater happiness, amusement or laughter. It is commonly placed at the end of a sentence, replacing the full stop. The colon is omitted due to being in a lesser-known position on the ЙЦУКЕН keyboard layout.

Kaomoji (Japan ASCII movement)
Kaomoji are often seen as the Japanese development of emoticons that is separate to the Scott Fahlman movement, which started in 1982. In 1986, a designer began to use brackets and other ASCII text characters to form faces.

Over time, those designs became much more complex than western emoticons and so they are often differentiated from each other although both use ASCII characters. Kaomoji also became focused around some Japanese industries, such as anime.

2channel
Users of the Japanese discussion board 2channel, in particular, have developed a wide variety of unique emoticons using characters from various scripts, such as Kannada, as in  (for a look of disapproval, disbelief, or confusion). Similarly, the letter ರೃ was used in emoticons to represent a monocle and ಥ to represent a tearing eye. They were quickly picked up by 4chan and spread to other Western sites soon after. Some have taken on a life of their own and become characters in their own right like Monā.

Korean
In South Korea, emoticons use Korean Hangul letters, and the Western style is rarely used. The structures of Korean and Japanese emoticons are somewhat similar, but they have some differences. Korean style contains Korean jamo (letters) instead of other characters. There are countless number of emoticons that can be formed with such combinations of Korean jamo letters. Consonant jamos,   or   as the mouth/nose component and  ,  , or   for the eyes. For example:, , , and. Faces such as,  ,  , and  , using quotation marks   and apostrophes   are also commonly used combinations. Vowel jamos such as ㅜ, ㅠ depict a crying face. Example:, and  (same function as T in western style). Sometimes ㅡ (not an em-dash "—" but a vowel jamo), a comma or an underscore  is added, and the two character sets can be mixed together, as in, , , , , and. Also, semicolons and carets are commonly used in Korean emoticons; semicolons mean sweating (embarrassed). If they are used with ㅡ or – they depict a bad feeling. Examples:, , , , and. However,, and   mean smile. Others include:, ,  , and.

Chinese ideographic
The character 囧 (U+56E7), which means bright, may be combined with posture emoticon Orz, such as 囧rz. The character existed in Oracle bone script, but was rarely used until its use as an emoticon, documented as early as January 20, 2005.

Other variants of 囧 include 崮 (king 囧), 莔 (queen 囧), 商 (囧 with hat), 囧興 (turtle), and 卣 (Bomberman).

The character 槑 (U+69D1), a variant of 梅 plum, is used to represent double of 呆 dull, or further magnitude of dullness. In Chinese, normally full characters (as opposed to the stylistic use of 槑) might be duplicated to express emphasis.

Orz
Orz (other forms include: Or2, on_, OTZ, OTL, STO, JTO, _no, ＿冂○, 囧 rz, ) is an emoticon representing a kneeling or bowing person (the Japanese version of which is called dogeza) with the "o" being the head, the "r" being the arms and part of the body, and the "z" being part of the body and the legs. This stick figure can represent respect or kowtowing, but commonly appears along a range of responses, including "frustration, despair, sarcasm, or grudging respect".

It was first used in late 2002 at the forum on Techside, a Japanese personal website. At the "Techside FAQ Forum" (TECHSIDE教えて君BBS(教えてBBS)), a poster asked about a cable cover, typing "＿|￣|○" to show a cable and its cover. Others commented that it looked like a kneeling person, and the symbol became popular. These comments were soon deleted as they were considered off-topic. By 2005, Orz spawned a subculture: blogs have been devoted to the emoticon, and URL shortening services have been named after it. In Taiwan, Orz is associated with the phrase "nice guy" – that is, the concept of males being rejected for a date by females, with a phrase like "You are a nice guy."

Orz should not be confused with m(_ _)m, which represents a standing bow directly towards the viewer as a means to say "Thank you" or as an apology.

Multimedia variations
A portmanteau of emotion and sound, an emotisound is a brief sound transmitted and played back during the viewing of a message, typically an IM message or e-mail message. The sound is intended to communicate an emotional subtext. Many instant messaging clients automatically trigger sound effects in response to specific emoticons.

Some services, such as MuzIcons, combine emoticons and music player in an Adobe Flash-based widget.

In 2004, the Trillian chat application introduced a feature called "emotiblips", which allows Trillian users to stream files to their instant message recipients "as the voice and video equivalent of an emoticon".

In 2007, MTV and Paramount Home Entertainment promoted the "emoticlip" as a form of viral marketing for the second season of the show The Hills. The emoticlips were twelve short snippets of dialogue from the show, uploaded to YouTube, which the advertisers hoped would be distributed between web users as a way of expressing feelings in a similar manner to emoticons. The emoticlip concept is credited to the Bradley & Montgomery advertising firm, which hopes they would be widely adopted as "greeting cards that just happen to be selling something".

In 2008, an emotion-sequence animation tool, called FunIcons was created. The Adobe Flash and Java-based application allows users to create a short animation. Users can then email or save their own animations to use them on similar social utility applications.

During the first half of the 2010s, there have been different forms of small audiovisual pieces to be sent through instant messaging systems to express one's emotion. These videos lack an established name, and there are several ways to designate them: "emoticlips" (named above), "emotivideos" or more recently "emoticon videos". These are tiny videos that can be easily transferred from one mobile phone to another. Current video compression codecs such as H.264 allow these pieces of video to be light in terms of file size and very portable. The popular computer and mobile app Skype use these in a separate keyboard or by typing the code of the "emoticon videos" between parentheses.

Emoticons and intellectual property rights

In 2000, Despair, Inc. obtained a U.S. trademark registration for the "frowny" emoticon when used on "greeting cards, posters and art prints". In 2001, they issued a satirical press release, announcing that they would sue Internet users who typed the frowny; the joke backfired and the company received a storm of protest when its mock release was posted on technology news website Slashdot.

A number of patent applications have been filed on inventions that assist in communicating with emoticons. A few of these have been issued as US patents. US 6987991, for example, discloses a method developed in 2001 to send emoticons over a cell phone using a drop-down menu. The stated advantage over the prior art was that the user saved on the number of keystrokes though this may not address the obviousness criteria.

The emoticon  was also filed in 2006 and registered in 2008 as a European Community Trademark (CTM). In Finland, the Supreme Administrative Court ruled in 2012 that the emoticon cannot be trademarked, thus repealing a 2006 administrative decision trademarking the emoticons,  ,  ,  , and.

In 2005, a Russian court rejected a legal claim against Siemens by a man who claimed to hold a trademark on the  emoticon.

In 2008, Russian entrepreneur Oleg Teterin claimed to have been granted the trademark on the  emoticon. A license would not "cost that much – tens of thousands of dollars" for companies, but would be free of charge for individuals.

Unicode
A different, but related, use of the term "emoticon" is found in the Unicode Standard, referring to a subset of emoji which display facial expressions. The standard explains this usage with reference to existing systems, which provided functionality for substituting certain textual emoticons with images or emoji of the expressions in question.

Some smiley faces were present in Unicode since 1.1, including a white frowning face, a white smiling face, and a black smiling face ("black" refers to a glyph which is filled, "white" refers to a glyph which is unfilled).

The Emoticons block was introduced in Unicode Standard version 6.0 (published in October 2010) and extended by 7.0. It covers Unicode range from U+1F600 to U+1F64F fully.

After that block had been filled, Unicode 8.0 (2015), 9.0 (2016) and 10.0 (2017) added additional emoticons in the range from U+1F910 to U+1F9FF. Currently, U+1F90C – U+1F90F, U+1F93F, U+1F94D – U+1F94F, U+1F96C – U+1F97F, U+1F998 – U+1F9CF (excluding U+1F9C0 which contains the 🧀 emoji) and U+1F9E7 – U+1F9FF do not contain any emoticons since Unicode 10.0.

For historic and compatibility reasons, some other heads, and figures, which mostly represent different aspects like genders, activities, and professions instead of emotions, are also found in Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs (especially U+1F466 – U+1F487) and Transport and Map Symbols. Body parts, mostly hands, are also encoded in the Dingbat and Miscellaneous Symbols blocks.

title: Emoticon


text:
Epoch (disambiguation)

An epoch is an instant in time chosen as the origin of a particular calendar era.

Epoch or EPOCH may also refer to:

Time-related

 * Any historical era
 * Epoch (astronomy), a moment in time used as a reference for the orbital elements of a celestial body
 * Epoch (computing), a moment from which system time is usually measured
 * Epoch (cosmology) or cosmologic epoch, a phase in the development of the universe since the Big Bang
 * Epoch (race), racial periods in Blavatsky's esoteric theory of the root races
 * Unix epoch, the starting time for Unix-based operating systems
 * Epoch (geology), a span of time on the geologic time scale shorter than a period and longer than an age
 * Epoch, a reward cycle on the Cardano blockchain platform

Arts and entertainment

 * Epoch (DC Comics), a supervillain also known as the Lord of Time
 * Epoch (Marvel Comics), a cosmic entity in the Marvel Comics universe
 * Epoch (film), a 2001 American science fiction film
 * Epoch (anthology), a 1975 anthology of science fiction stories
 * Epoch (video game), a 1981 space combat game for the Apple II
 * Epoch (The Brave album), 2016
 * Epoch (Tycho album), 2016
 * Epoch, a 2006 album by Rip Slyme

Games

 * Epoch Co., a Japanese toy and computer games company
 * Epoch Game Pocket Computer, an early hand-held game console produced by Epoch Co.
 * Epoch (Chrono Trigger), a flying time machine in role-playing game Chrono Trigger
 * Epoch Hunter, a boss in Caverns of Time from the game World of Warcraft

Publications

 * Epoch (American magazine), literary magazine of Cornell University
 * Epoch (Russian magazine), literary magazine by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his brother Mikhail
 * Ha-Tsfira (lit. Epoch), a Hebrew language newspaper published in 1862 and 1874–1931
 * The Epoch Times, a privately owned Falun Gong-linked newspaper

Science and technology

 * EPOCH (chemotherapy), a chemotherapy regimen
 * EPOCh (Extrasolar Planet Observation and Characterization), a NASA mission associated with EPOXI

Weapons

 * Epoch Remote Control Turret

title: Epoch (disambiguation)