January 4, 2007
UW a Recipient of the First Annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration
The UW is one of 10 non-profit institutions to be recognized in the first annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration. The Mellon Awards honor non-profit organizations for leadership in collaborative development of open source software tools with particular application to higher education and not-for-profit activities.
The UW was one of three institutions receiving $100,000 awards; the other seven received $50,000. The UW was recognized for its decades-long contributions to e-mail standards and software, specifically the Pine messaging system (www.washington.edu/pine) and IMAP, the Internet Message Access Protocol (www.washington.edu/imap).
The Pine messaging system includes e-mail client programs for Windows, Linux/Unix, and the Web; a rich set of development libraries; and the UW IMAP server.
Pine was originally developed by the UW 15 years ago as a replacement for the mail system on UW’s primary administrative system, an IBM mainframe that was decommissioned in the early 1990s. In due course, it became the mail program of choice for many at UW, and has been used worldwide by over 29 million people. Pine continues to have a strong and loyal following. It was one of the first e-mail client applications to support remote access (using IMAP) to messages stored centrally.
IMAP is the foundation of UW’s core e-mail service, which supports any IMAP-compatible e-mail client (not just Pine). IMAP and Pine are supported by UW Computing & Communications (C&C). The UW plans to use the award to support the open-source development of a next-generation Web-mail client, focusing primarily on a major user-interface redesign of the current WebPine (the Web-based version of Pine).
The UW’s contributions brought about a major breakthrough in e-mail technology that enabled a new generation of e-mail infrastructure for higher education, as well as for commercial and non-profit sectors, making it possible for people to access their e-mail when and where they need to, independent of any particular computer. In fact, all major e-mail software (Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, Lotus Notes, Oracle, Novell, and many open source implementations) now use IMAP. The UW collaborated with other institutions (notably Carnegie Mellon University) to evolve the original design–by Mark Crispin at Stanford University, 20 years ago–into its current rich protocol, and shepherded it through the Internet Engineering Task Force standardization process.
Terry Gray, C&C’s Associate Vice President for Technology Engineering, received the award for UW. “It is extremely gratifying to have such a distinguished panel of judges recognize our efforts,” said Gray. “It is also terrific that the Mellon award will allow us to continue to make contributions in this area, and give the results back to the community.”
More information on the 2006 Mellon winners is available at http://rit.mellon.org/awards/matcpressrelease.pdf/
