POPmail was an early e-mail client written at the
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public land-grant research university in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. ...
.
The original version was a
Hypercard
HyperCard is a software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web.
HyperCard combines a flat-file database with a graphical, f ...
stack that acted as a
Post Office Protocol
In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. POP version 3 (POP3) is the version in common use, and along with IMAP the most common ...
client. Later versions of POPmail were written as normal Macintosh applications, and a PC version of POPmail was also released. POPmail and
Eudora were both instrumental in moving higher education e-mail use away from terminal-based user interfaces and into a client–server GUI metaphor.
Searches of USENET news from the late 1980s to the early 1990s illustrate the early adoption of TCP/IP-based mail clients, and the increasing popularity of this approach in the early 1990s.
References
Classic Mac OS email clients
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