Mail on the NeXT Computer was pretty amazing in 1991. Multimedia! Fonts! Attachments! Sounds! It’s hard to overstate how cool that was compared to the command line email everybody was used to.
These couldn’t have been HTML emails as that wasn’t really formalized until 1993. So some proprietary thing, I suppose, that only worked between NeXT computers. Maybe it had a plain text fallback too? Just like HTML emails have now. Maybe that was the origin of that idea, not sure.
Steve’s story was actually about email aliases and how snagging steve@next.com probably wasn’t the smartest idea in the world.
That makes me think about the .com part. What were domain names like next.com primarily for during like 1989-1993 if HTML wasn’t a thing yet? Mostly email? FTP? Telnet?
It also makes me think about wildcard/catch-all email addresses. As in, I wonder if it’s actually useful to set up something that catches any email to *@chriscoyier.net and forwards it to me. Or if that’s inviting in spam for no good reason.
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