name	R.E.M.
alt	A blue-tinted photograph of musicians in front of an industrial background. From left to right: a long-haired male stands with his back to the camera playing bass guitar, a middle-aged Caucasian male sings into a microphone, a middle-aged Caucasian male plays behind a black-and-silver drum set on a riser, and a guitar player is mostly cropped from the extreme left of the photo.
landscape	yes
background	group_or_band
years active	1980–present
alias	Hornets Attack Victor Mature, Bingo Hand Job, It Crawled from the South
origin	Athens, Georgia, United States
genre	Alternative rock, college rock, jangle pop
label	Hib-Tone, I.R.S., New West, Warner Bros.
associated acts	Automatic Baby, The Baseball Project, Hindu Love Gods, The Minus 5, Tuatara, Tired Pony
current members
past members	Bill Berry
website	}}

R.E.M. is an American rock band formed in Athens, Georgia, in 1980 by singer Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry. One of the first popular alternative rock bands, R.E.M. gained early attention due to Buck's ringing, arpeggiated guitar style and Stipe's unclear vocals. R.E.M. released its first single, "Radio Free Europe", in 1981 on the independent record label Hib-Tone. The single was followed by the ''Chronic Town'' EP in 1982, the band's first release on I.R.S. Records. In 1983, the group released its critically acclaimed debut album, ''Murmur'', and built its reputation over the next few years through subsequent releases, constant touring, and the support of college radio. Following years of underground success, R.E.M. achieved a mainstream hit in 1987 with the single "The One I Love". The group signed to Warner Bros. Records in 1988, and began to espouse political and environmental concerns while playing large arenas worldwide.

By the early 1990s, when alternative rock began to experience broad mainstream success, R.E.M. was viewed as a pioneer of the genre and released its two most commercially successful albums, ''Out of Time'' (1991) and ''Automatic for the People'' (1992), which veered from the band's established sound. R.E.M.'s 1994 release, ''Monster'', was a return to a more rock-oriented sound. The band began its first tour in six years to support the album; the tour was marred by medical emergencies suffered by three band members. In 1996, R.E.M. re-signed with Warner Bros. for a reported US$80 million, at the time the most expensive recording contract in history. The following year, Bill Berry left the band, while Buck, Mills, and Stipe continued the group as a three-piece. Through some changes in musical style, the band continued its career into the next decade with mixed critical and commercial success. In 2007, the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

History

Formation: 1980–1981

In January 1980, Michael Stipe met Peter Buck in the Athens record store where Buck worked. The pair discovered that they shared similar tastes in music, particularly punk rock and protopunk artists like Patti Smith, Television, and The Velvet Underground. Stipe said, "It turns out that I was buying all the records that [Buck] was saving for himself." Stipe and Buck soon met fellow University of Georgia students Mike Mills and Bill Berry, who had played music together since high school. The quartet agreed to collaborate on several songs; Stipe later commented that "there was never any grand plan behind any of it". Their still-unnamed band spent several months rehearsing and played its first show on April 5, 1980 at a friend's birthday party held in a converted Episcopal church. After considering names like "Twisted Kites", "Cans of Piss", and "Negro Wives", the band settled on "R.E.M.", which Stipe selected at random from a dictionary.

The band members eventually dropped out of school to focus on their developing group. They found a manager in Jefferson Holt, a record store clerk who was so impressed by an R.E.M. performance in his hometown of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that he moved to Athens. R.E.M.'s success was almost immediate in Athens and surrounding areas; the band drew progressively larger crowds for shows, which caused some resentment in the Athens music scene. Over the next year and a half, R.E.M. toured throughout the Southern United States. Touring was arduous since a touring circuit for alternative rock bands did not then exist. The group had to tour in an old blue van driven by Holt, and the band members lived on a food allowance of $2 a day.

During the summer of 1981, R.E.M. recorded its first single, "Radio Free Europe", at producer Mitch Easter's Drive-In Studios in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The single was released on the local independent record label Hib-Tone with an initial pressing of one thousand copies, which quickly sold out. Despite its limited pressing, the single garnered critical acclaim, and was listed as one of the ten best singles of the year by ''The New York Times''.

I.R.S. Records and cult success: 1982–1986

R.E.M. recorded the ''Chronic Town'' EP with Mitch Easter in October 1981, and planned to release it on a new indie label named Dasht Hopes. However, I.R.S. Records acquired a demo of the band's first recording session with Easter that had been circulating for months. The band turned down the advances of major label RCA Records in favor of I.R.S., with whom they signed a contract in May 1982. I.R.S. released ''Chronic Town'' that August as its first American release. A positive review of the EP by ''NME'' praised the songs' auras of mystery, and concluded, "R.E.M. ring true, and it's great to hear something as unforced and cunning as this."

I.R.S. first paired R.E.M. with producer Stephen Hague to record its debut album. Hague's emphasis on technical perfection left the band unsatisfied, and the band members asked the label to let them record with Easter. I.R.S. agreed to a "tryout" session, allowing the band to return to North Carolina and record the song "Pilgrimage" with Easter and producing partner Don Dixon. After hearing the track, I.R.S. permitted the group to record the album with Dixon and Easter. Because of its bad experience with Hague, the band recorded the album via a process of negation, refusing to incorporate rock music clichés such as guitar solos or then-popular synthesizers, in order to give its music a timeless feel. The completed album, ''Murmur'', was greeted with critical acclaim upon its release in 1983, with ''Rolling Stone'' listing the album as its record of the year. The album reached number 36 on the ''Billboard'' album chart. A re-recorded version of "Radio Free Europe" was the album's lead single and reached number 78 on the ''Billboard'' singles chart in 1983. Despite the acclaim awarded the album, ''Murmur'' sold only about 200,000 copies, which I.R.S.'s Jay Boberg felt was below expectations.

R.E.M. made its first national television appearance on ''Late Night with David Letterman'' in October 1983, during which the group performed a new, unnamed song. The piece, eventually titled "So. Central Rain (I'm Sorry)", became the first single from the band's second album, ''Reckoning'' (1984), which was also recorded with Easter and Dixon. The album met with critical acclaim; ''NME''s Mat Snow wrote that ''Reckoning'' "confirms R.E.M. as one of the most beautifully exciting groups on the planet". While ''Reckoning'' peaked at number 27 on the US album charts—an unusually high chart placing for a college rock band at the time—scant airplay and poor distribution overseas resulted in it charting no higher than number 91 in Britain.

thumb|250px|alt=A black-and-white photograph of Michael Stipe and Peter Buck performing on stage with spotlights on them. Stipe is to the left singing into a microphone, wearing a three-piece suit, he has bleach-blond hair and is obscuring Mike Mills, whose bass guitar is visible from behind him. Peter Buck is playing guitar and wearing a button-up pattern shirt behind Stipe to the photograph's right with a sneer on his face.|Michael Stipe (left) and Peter Buck (right) on stage in Ghent, Belgium, during R.E.M.'s 1985 tour.The band's third album, ''Fables of the Reconstruction'' (1985), demonstrated a change in direction. Instead of Dixon and Easter, R.E.M. chose producer Joe Boyd, who had worked with Fairport Convention and Nick Drake, to record the album in England. The band members found the sessions unexpectedly difficult, and were miserable due to the cold winter weather and poor food; the situation brought the band to the verge of break-up. The gloominess surrounding the sessions ended up providing the context for the album itself. Lyrically, Stipe began to create storylines in the mode of Southern mythology, noting in a 1985 interview that he was inspired by "the whole idea of the old men sitting around the fire, passing on ... legends and fables to the grandchildren". ''Fables of the Reconstruction'' became the highest-selling record released by I.R.S. in America at that point. However, the album performed poorly in Europe and its critical reception was mixed, with some critics regarding it as dreary and poorly recorded. As with the previous records, the singles from ''Fables of the Reconstruction'' were mostly ignored by mainstream radio. Meanwhile, I.R.S. was becoming frustrated with the band's reluctance to achieve mainstream success.

For its fourth album, R.E.M. enlisted John Mellencamp producer Don Gehman. The result, ''Lifes Rich Pageant'' (1986) featured Stipe's vocals closer to the forefront of the music. In a 1986 interview with the ''Chicago Tribune'', Peter Buck related, "Michael is getting better at what he's doing, and he's getting more confident at it. And I think that shows up in the projection of his voice." The album improved markedly upon the sales of ''Fables of the Reconstruction'' and eventually peaked at number 21 on the ''Billboard'' album chart. The single "Fall on Me" also picked up support on commercial radio. The album was the band's first to be certified gold for selling 500,000 copies. While American college radio remained R.E.M.'s core support, the band was beginning to chart hits on mainstream rock formats; however, the music still encountered resistance from Top 40 radio. Following the success of ''Lifes Rich Pageant'', I.R.S. issued ''Dead Letter Office'', a compilation of tracks recorded by the band during their album sessions, many of which had either been issued as B-sides or left unreleased altogether. Shortly thereafter, I.R.S. compiled R.E.M.'s music video catalog (except "Wolves, Lower") as the band's first video release, ''Succumbs''.

Breakthrough success: 1987–1993

Don Gehman was unable to produce R.E.M.'s fifth album, so he suggested the group work with Scott Litt. Litt would be the producer for the band's next five albums. ''Document'' (1987) featured some of Stipe's most openly political lyrics, particularly on "Welcome To the Occupation" and "Exhuming McCarthy", which were reactions to the conservative political environment of the 1980s under American President Ronald Reagan. Jon Pareles of ''The New York Times'' wrote in his review of the album, "'Document' is both confident and defiant; if R.E.M. is about to move from cult-band status to mass popularity, the album decrees that the band will get there on its own terms." ''Document'' was R.E.M.'s breakthrough album, and the first single "The One I Love" charted in the Top 20 in the US, UK, and Canada. By January 1988, ''Document'' had become the group's first album to sell a million copies. In light of the band's breakthrough, the December 1987 cover of ''Rolling Stone'' declared R.E.M. "America's Best Rock & Roll Band".

Frustrated that its records did not see satisfactory overseas distribution, R.E.M. left I.R.S. when its contract expired and signed with the major label Warner Bros. Records. In 1988, I.R.S. released the compilation ''Eponymous'', which included most of the band's singles and a number of rarities. The band's 1988 Warner Bros. debut, ''Green'', was recorded in Nashville, Tennessee, and showcased the group experimenting with its sound. The record's tracks ranged from the upbeat first single "Stand" (a hit in the United States), to more political material, like the rock-oriented "Orange Crush" and "World Leader Pretend", which address the Vietnam War and the Cold War, respectively. ''Green'' has gone on to sell four million copies worldwide. The band supported the album with its biggest and most visually developed tour to date, featuring back-projections and art films playing on the stage. After the ''Green'' tour, the band members unofficially decided to take the following year off, the first extended break in the band's career.

R.E.M. reconvened in mid-1990 to record its seventh album, ''Out of Time''. In a departure from ''Green'', the band members often wrote the music with non-traditional rock instrumentation including mandolin, organ, and acoustic guitar instead of adding them as overdubs later in the creative process. Released in March 1991, ''Out of Time'' was the band's first album to top both the US and UK charts. The record eventually sold 4.2 million copies in the US alone, and about 12 million copies worldwide by 1996. The album's lead single "Losing My Religion" was a worldwide hit that received heavy rotation on radio, as did the music video on MTV. "Losing My Religion" was R.E.M.'s highest-charting single in the US, reaching number four on the ''Billboard'' charts. "There've been very few life-changing events in our career because our career has been so gradual," Mills said years later. "If you want to talk about life changing, I think 'Losing My Religion' is the closest it gets". The album's second single. "Shiny Happy People" (one of three songs on the record to feature vocals from Kate Pierson of fellow Athens band The B-52's), was also a major hit, reaching number 10 in the US and number six in the UK. ''Out of Time'' garnered R.E.M. seven nominations at the 1992 Grammy Awards, the most nominations of any artist that year. The band won three awards: one for Best Alternative Music Album and two for "Losing My Religion", Best Short Form Music Video and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. R.E.M. did not tour to promote ''Out of Time''; instead the group played a series of one-off shows, including an appearance taped for an episode of ''MTV Unplugged''.

After spending some months off, R.E.M. returned to the studio in 1991 to record its next album. Late in 1992, the band released ''Automatic for the People''. Though the group had intended to make a harder-rocking album after the softer textures of ''Out of Time'', the somber ''Automatic for the People'' "[seemed] to move at an even more agonized crawl", according to ''Melody Maker''. The album dealt with themes of loss and mourning inspired by "that sense of ... turning thirty", according to Buck. Several songs featured string arrangements by former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. Considered by a number of critics (as well as by Buck and Mills) to be the band's best album, ''Automatic for the People'' reached numbers one and two on UK and US charts, respectively, and generated the American Top 40 hit singles "Drive", "Man on the Moon", and "Everybody Hurts". The album would sell about ten million copies worldwide. As with ''Out of Time'', there was no tour in support of the album. The decision to forgo a tour, in conjunction with Stipe's physical appearance, generated rumors that the singer was dying, which were vehemently denied by the band.

''Monster'' and ''New Adventures in Hi-Fi'': 1994–1996

After the band released two slow-paced albums in a row, R.E.M.'s 1994 album ''Monster'' was, as Buck said, "a 'rock' record, with the rock in quotation marks." In contrast to the sound of its predecessors, the music of ''Monster'' consisted of distorted guitar tones, minimal overdubs, and touches of 1970s glam rock. Like ''Out of Time'', ''Monster'' topped the charts in both the US and UK. The record sold about nine million copies worldwide. The singles "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" and "Bang and Blame" were the band's last American Top 40 hits, although all the singles from ''Monster'' reached the Top 30 on the British charts.

In January 1995 R.E.M. set out on its first tour in six years. The tour was a huge commercial success, but the period was difficult for the group. On March 1, Berry collapsed on stage during a performance in Lausanne, Switzerland, having suffered a brain aneurysm. He had surgery immediately and recovered fully within a month. Berry's aneurysm was only the beginning of a series of health problems that plagued the Monster Tour. Mills had to undergo abdominal surgery to remove an intestinal adhesion in July; a month later, Stipe had to have an emergency surgery to repair a hernia. Despite all the problems, the group had recorded the bulk of a new album while on the road. The band brought along eight-track recorders to capture its shows, and used the recordings as the base elements for the album.

R.E.M. re-signed with Warner Bros. Records in 1996 for a reported $80 million, the largest recording contract in history at that point. The group's 1996 album ''New Adventures in Hi-Fi'' debuted at number two in the US and number one in the UK. The five million copies of the album sold were a reversal of the group's commercial fortunes of the previous five years. ''Time'' writer Christopher John Farley argued that the lesser sales of the album were due to the declining commercial power of alternative rock as a whole. That same year, R.E.M. parted ways with manager Jefferson Holt, allegedly due to sexual harassment charges levied against him by a member of the band's home office in Athens. The group's lawyer, Bertis Downs, assumed managerial duties.

Berry's departure and ''Up'': 1997–2000

In April 1997, the band convened at Buck's Kauai holiday home to record demos of material intended for the next album. The band sought to reinvent its sound and intended to incorporate drum loops and percussion experiments. Just as the sessions were due to begin in October, Berry decided, after months of contemplation and discussions with Downs and Mills, to tell the rest of the band that he was quitting. Berry told his band mates that he would not quit if they would break up as a result, so Stipe, Mills, and Buck agreed to carry on as a three-piece with his blessing. Berry publicly announced his departure three weeks later in October 1997. Berry told the press, "I'm just not as enthusiastic as I have been in the past about doing this anymore . . . I have the best job in the world. But I'm kind of ready to sit back and reflect and maybe not be a pop star anymore." Stipe admitted that the band would be different without a major contributor: "For me, Mike, and Peter, as R.E.M., are we still R.E.M.? I guess a three-legged dog is still a dog. It just has to learn to run differently." The remaining members of R.E.M. resumed work on the album in February 1998 at Toast Studios in San Francisco. The band ended its decade-long collaboration with Scott Litt and hired Pat McCarthy to produce the record. Nigel Godrich was taken on as assistant producer, and drafted in ex-Screaming Trees member Barrett Martin and Beck's touring drummer Joey Waronker. The recording process was plagued with tension, and the group came close to disbanding. Bertis Downs called an emergency meeting where the band members sorted out their problems and agreed to continue as a group. Led off by the single "Daysleeper", ''Up'' (1998) debuted in the top ten in the US and UK. However, the album was a relative failure, selling 900,000 copies in the US by mid-1999 and eventually selling just over two million copies worldwide. While R.E.M.'s American sales were declining, the group's commercial base was shifting to the UK, where more R.E.M. records were sold per capita than any other country and the band's singles regularly entered the Top 20.

A year after ''Up'''s release, R.E.M. wrote the instrumental score to the Andy Kaufman biopic ''Man on the Moon'', a first for the group. The film took its title from the ''Automatic for the People'' song of the same name. The song "The Great Beyond" was released as a single from the ''Man on the Moon'' soundtrack album. "The Great Beyond" only reached number 57 on the American pop charts, but was the band's highest-charting single ever in the UK, reaching number three in 2000.

''Reveal'' and ''Around the Sun'': 2001–2005

R.E.M. recorded the majority of its twelfth album ''Reveal'' (2001) in Canada and Ireland from May to October 2000. ''Reveal'' shared the "lugubrious pace" of ''Up'', and featured drumming by Joey Waronker, as well as contributions by Scott McCaughey (a co-founder of the band The Minus 5 with Buck) and Posies founder Ken Stringfellow. Global sales of the album were over four million, but in the United States ''Reveal'' sold about the same number of copies as ''Up''. The album was led by the single "Imitation of Life", which reached number six in the UK. Writing for ''Rock's Backpages'', The Rev. Al Friston described the album as "loaded with golden loveliness at every twist and turn", in comparison to the group's "essentially unconvincing work on ''New Adventures in Hi-Fi'' and ''Up''." Similarly, Rob Sheffield of ''Rolling Stone'' called ''Reveal'' "a spiritual renewal rooted in a musical one" and praised its "ceaselessly astonishing beauty."

In 2003, Warner Bros. released the compilation album ''In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003'', which featured two new songs, "Bad Day" and "Animal". That same year Berry made a surprise appearance during an R.E.M. concert in Raleigh, North Carolina, performing backing vocals on "Radio Free Europe". He then sat behind the drum kit for a performance of the early R.E.M. song "Permanent Vacation", marking his first performance with the band since his retirement.

R.E.M. released ''Around the Sun'' in 2004. During production of the album in 2002, Stipe said, "[The album] sounds like it's taking off from the last couple of records into unchartered R.E.M. territory. Kind of primitive and howling". After the album's release, Mills said, "I think, honestly, it turned out a little slower than we intended for it to, just in terms of the overall speed of songs." ''Around the Sun'' received a mixed critical reception, and peaked at number 13 on the ''Billboard'' charts. The first single from the album, "Leaving New York", was a Top 5 hit in the UK. For the record and subsequent tour, the band hired a new full-time touring drummer, Bill Rieflin, who had previously been a member of several industrial music acts such as Ministry and Pigface. In late 2004 R.E.M. toured with Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Pearl Jam, Bright Eyes and others on the Vote for Change tour. Throughout 2005, the band embarked on its first full-length world tour since the Monster Tour ten years earlier. During the tour, R.E.M. participated in the London event of Live 8.

''Accelerate'' and ''Collapse into Now'': 2006–present

EMI, which owns the I.R.S. catalogue, released a compilation album covering R.E.M.'s work during its tenure on the label in 2006 called ''And I Feel Fine... The Best of the I.R.S. Years 1982-1987''. The DVD ''When the Light Is Mine: The Best of the I.R.S. Years 1982-1987'' was released simultaneously. That same month, all four original band members performed during the ceremony for their induction into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. While rehearsing for the ceremony, the band recorded a cover of John Lennon's "#9 Dream" for ''Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur'', a tribute album benefiting Amnesty International. The song—released as a single for the album and the campaign—featured Bill Berry's first studio recording with the band since his departure almost a decade earlier. In October 2006, R.E.M. was nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in its first year of eligibility. The band was one of five nominees accepted into the Hall that year, and the induction ceremony took place in March 2007 at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The group—which was inducted by Pearl Jam lead singer Eddie Vedder—performed four songs with Bill Berry.

Work on the group's fourteenth album commenced in early 2007. The band recorded with producer Jacknife Lee in Vancouver and Dublin, where it played five nights in the Olympia Theatre between June 30 and July 5 as part of a "working rehearsal". ''R.E.M. Live'', the band's first live album (featuring songs from a 2005 Dublin show), was released in October 2007. The group followed this effort with the 2009 live album ''Live at The Olympia''. R.E.M. released ''Accelerate'' in early 2008. The album debuted at number two on the ''Billboard'' charts, and became the band's eighth album to top the British album charts. ''Rolling Stone'' reviewer David Fricke considered ''Accelerate'' an improvement over the band's previous post-Berry albums, calling it "one of the best records R.E.M. have ever made."

In 2010, R.E.M. released the video album ''R.E.M. Live from Austin, TX''—a concert recorded for ''Austin City Limits'' in 2008. The group recorded its fifteenth album, ''Collapse into Now'' (2011), with Jacknife Lee in locales including Berlin, Nashville, and New Orleans. For the album, the band aimed for a more expansive sound than the intentionally short and speedy approach implemented on ''Accelerate''. The album debuted at number five on the ''Billboard'' 200, becoming the group's tenth album to reach the top ten of the chart.

Musical style

In a 1988 interview, Peter Buck described typical R.E.M. songs as, "Minor key, mid-tempo, enigmatic, semi-folk-rock-balladish things. That's what everyone thinks and to a certain degree, that's true." All songwriting is credited to the entire band, even though individual members are sometimes responsible for writing the majority of a particular song. Each member is given an equal vote in the songwriting process; however, Buck has conceded that Stipe, as the band's lyricist, can rarely be persuaded to follow an idea he does not favor. Among the original line-up, there were divisions of labor in the songwriting process: Stipe would write lyrics and devise melodies, Buck would edge the band in new musical directions, and Mills and Berry would fine-tune the compositions due to their greater musical experience.

Michael Stipe sings in what R.E.M. biographer David Buckley described as "wailing, keening, arching vocal figures". Stipe often harmonizes with Mills in songs; in the chorus for "Stand", Mills and Stipe alternate singing lyrics, creating a dialogue. Early articles about the band focused on Stipe's singing style (described as "mumbling" by ''The Washington Post''), which often rendered his lyrics indecipherable. ''Creem'' writer John Morthland wrote in his review of ''Murmur'', "I still have no idea what these songs are about, because neither me nor anyone else I know has ever been able to discern R.E.M.'s lyrics." Stipe commented in 1984, "It's just the way I sing. If I tried to control it, it would be pretty false." Producer Joe Boyd convinced Stipe to begin singing more clearly during the recording of ''Fables of the Reconstruction''.

Stipe insisted that many of his early lyrics were "nonsense", saying in a 1994 online chat, "You all know there aren't words, ''per se'', to a lot of the early stuff. I can't even remember them." In truth, Stipe carefully crafted the lyrics to many early R.E.M. songs. Stipe explained in 1984 that when he started writing lyrics they were like "simple pictures", but after a year he grew tired of the approach and "started experimenting with lyrics that didn't make exact linear sense, and it's just gone from there." In the mid-1980s, as Stipe's pronunciation while singing became clearer, the band decided that its lyrics should convey ideas on a more literal level. Mills explained, "After you've made three records and you've written several songs and they've gotten better and better lyrically the next step would be to have somebody question you and say, are you saying anything? And Michael had the confidence at that point to say yes . . ." Songs like "Cuyahoga" and "Fall on Me" on ''Lifes Rich Pageant'' dealt with such concerns as pollution. Stipe incorporated more politically-oriented concerns into his lyrics on ''Document'' and ''Green''. "Our political activism and the content of the songs was just a reaction to where we were, and what we were surrounded by, which was just abject horror," Stipe said later. "In 1987 and '88 there was nothing to do but be active." Stipe has since explored other lyrical topics. ''Automatic for the People'' dealt with "mortality and dying. Pretty turgid stuff", according to Stipe, while ''Monster'' critiqued love and mass culture.

Peter Buck's style of playing guitar has been singled out by many as the most distinctive aspect of R.E.M.'s music. During the 1980s, Buck's "economical, arpeggiated, poetic" style reminded British music journalists of 1960s American folk rock band The Byrds. Buck has stated "[Byrds guitarist] Roger McGuinn was a big influence on me as a guitar player", but said it was Byrds-influenced bands, including Big Star and The Soft Boys, that inspired him more. Comparisons were also made with the guitar playing of Johnny Marr of alternative rock contemporaries The Smiths. While Buck professed being a fan of the group, he admitted he initially criticized the band simply because he was tired of fans asking him if he was influenced by Marr, whose band had in fact made their debut several years after R.E.M. Buck generally eschews guitar solos; he explained in 2002, "I know that when guitarists rip into this hot solo, people go nuts, but I don't write songs that suit that, and I am not interested in that. I can do it if I have to, but I don't like it." Mike Mills' melodic approach to bass playing is inspired by Paul McCartney of The Beatles and Chris Squire of Yes; Mills has said, "I always played a melodic bass, like a piano bass in some ways . . . I never wanted to play the traditional locked into the kick drum, root note bass work." Mills has more musical training than his band mates, which he has said "made it easier to turn abstract musical ideas into reality."

Legacy

R.E.M. was pivotal in the creation and development of the alternative rock genre. Allmusic stated, "R.E.M. mark the point when post-punk turned into alternative rock." In the early 1980s, the alternative rock of R.E.M. stood in contrast to the post-punk and New Wave genres that had preceded it. Music journalist Simon Reynolds noted that the post-punk movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s "had taken whole swaths of music off the menu", particularly that of the 1960s, and that "After postpunk's demystification and New Pop's schematics, it felt liberating to listen to music rooted in mystical awe and blissed-out surrender." Reynolds declared R.E.M., a band that recalled the music of the 1960s with its "plangent guitar chimes and folk-styled vocals" and who "wistfully and abstractly conjured visions and new frontiers for America", one of "the two most important alt-rock bands of the day." With the release of ''Murmur'', R.E.M. had the most impact musically and commercially of the developing alternative genre's early groups, leaving in its wake a number of jangle pop followers.

R.E.M.'s early breakthrough success served as an inspiration for other alternative bands. ''Spin'' referred to the "R.E.M. model"—career decisions that R.E.M. made which set guidelines for other underground artists to follow in their own careers. ''Spin's'' Charles Aaron wrote that by 1985, "They'd shown how far an underground, punk-inspired rock band could go within the industry without whoring out its artistic integrity in any obvious way. They'd figured out how to buy in, not sellout-in other words, they'd achieved the American Bohemian Dream." Steve Wynn of Dream Syndicate said, "They invented a whole new ballgame for all of the other bands to follow whether it was Sonic Youth or the Replacements or Nirvana or Butthole Surfers. R.E.M. staked the claim. Musically, the bands did different things, but R.E.M. was first to show us you can be big and still be cool." Biographer David Buckley stated that between 1991 and 1994, a period that saw the band sell an estimated 30 million albums, R.E.M. "asserted themselves as rivals to U2 for the title of biggest rock band in the world." Over the course of its career, the band has sold over 70 million records.

Later alternative bands such as Nirvana, Pavement, and Live have drawn inspiration from R.E.M.'s music. "When I was 15 years old in Richmond, Virginia, they were a ''very'' important part of my life," Pavement's Bob Nastanovich said, "as they were for all the members of our band." Pavement devoted the song "Unseen Power of the Picket Fence" from the ''No Alternative'' compilation (1993) to discussing R.E.M's first two albums at length. Kurt Cobain of Nirvana was a vocal fan of R.E.M., and had plans to collaborate on a musical project with Stipe before his death in April 1994. Cobain told ''Rolling Stone'' in an interview earlier that year, "I don’t know how that band does what they do. God, they’re the greatest. They’ve dealt with their success like saints, and they keep delivering great music."

Campaigning and activism

Throughout R.E.M.'s career, its members have sought to highlight social and political issues. According to the ''Los Angeles Times'', R.E.M. is considered to be one of the United States' "most liberal and politically correct rock groups." The band's members are "on the same page" politically, sharing a liberal and progressive outlook. Mills has admitted that there is occasionally dissension between band members on what causes they might support, but acknowledged "Out of respect for the people who disagree, those discussions tend to stay in-house, just because we'd rather not let people know where the divisions lie, so people can't exploit them for their own purposes." An example is that in 1990 Buck noted that Stipe was involved with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, but the rest of the band was not.

R.E.M. has helped raise funds for environmental, feminist and human rights causes, and has been involved in campaigns to encourage voter registration. During the ''Green'' tour, Stipe took time during sets to inform the audience about a variety of pressing socio-political issues. Through the late 1980s and 1990s, the band (particularly Stipe) increasingly used its media coverage on national television to mention a variety of causes it felt were important. One example is when the band attended the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards, during which Stipe wore a half-dozen white shirts emblazoned with slogans including "rainforest", "love knows no colors", and "handgun control now". R.E.M. helped raise awareness of Aung San Suu Kyi and human rights violations in Burma, when they worked with the Freedom Campaign and the US Campaign for Burma. Stipe himself ran ads for the 1988 supporting Democratic presidential candidate and Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis over then-Vice President George H. W. Bush. In 2004, the band participated in the Vote for Change tour that sought to mobilize American voters to support Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. R.E.M.'s political stance, particularly coming from a wealthy rock band under contract to a label owned by a multinational corporation, has received criticism from former ''Q'' editor Paul Du Noyer, who criticized the band's "celebrity liberalism", saying, "It's an entirely pain-free form of rebellion that they're adopting. There's no risk involved in it whatsoever, but quite a bit of shoring up of customer loyalty."

Since the late 1980s, R.E.M. has been involved in the local politics of its hometown of Athens, Georgia. Buck explained to ''Sounds'' in 1987, "Michael always says think local and act local—we have been doing a lot of stuff in our town to try and make it a better place." The band has often donated funds to local charities and to help renovate and preserve historic buildings in the town. R.E.M.'s political clout was credited with the narrow election of Athens mayor Gwen O'Looney twice in the 1990s.

Discography

''Murmur'' (1983)

''Reckoning'' (1984)

''Fables of the Reconstruction'' (1985)

''Lifes Rich Pageant'' (1986)

''Document'' (1987)

''Green'' (1988)

''Out of Time'' (1991)

''Automatic for the People'' (1992)

''Monster'' (1994)

''New Adventures in Hi-Fi'' (1996)

''Up'' (1998)

''Reveal'' (2001)

''Around the Sun'' (2004)

''Accelerate'' (2008)

''Collapse into Now'' (2011)

References

Black, Johnny. ''Reveal: The Story of R.E.M.'' Backbeat, 2004. ISBN 0-87930-776-5

Buckley, David. ''R.E.M.: Fiction: An Alternative Biography''. Virgin, 2002. ISBN 1-85227-927-3

Gray, Marcus. ''It Crawled from the South: An R.E.M. Companion''. Da Capo, 1997. Second edition. ISBN 0-306-80751-3

Fletcher, Tony. ''Remarks Remade: The Story of R.E.M.'' Omnibus, 2002. ISBN 0-7119-9113-8.

Platt, John (editor). ''The R.E.M. Companion: Two Decades of Commentary''. Schirmer, 1998. ISBN 0-02-864935-4

Sullivan, Denise. ''Talk About the Passion: R.E.M.: An Oral Biography''. Underwood-Miller, 1994. ISBN 0-88733-184-X

Notes

External links

Category:Alternative rock groups from Georgia (U.S. state) Category:Rock music groups from Georgia (U.S. state) Category:BRIT Award winners Category:Grammy Award winners Category:I.R.S. Records artists Category:New West Records artists Category:Warner Bros. Records artists Category:Musical groups established in 1980 Category:Musical quartets Category:Musical trios Category:Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees

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Electronic mail, commonly called email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the same time, in common with instant messaging. 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 connect only briefly, typically to an email server, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages.

An email message consists of three components, the message ''envelope'', the message ''header'', and the message ''body''. The message header contains control information, including, minimally, an originator's email address and one or more recipient addresses. Usually descriptive information is also added, such as a subject header field and a message submission date/time stamp.

Originally a text-only (7-bit ASCII and others) communications medium, email was extended to carry multi-media content attachments, a process standardized in RFC 2045 through 2049. Collectively, these RFCs have come to be called Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME).

Electronic mail predates the inception of the Internet, and was in fact a crucial tool in creating it, but the history of modern, global Internet email services reaches back to the early ARPANET. Standards for encoding email messages were proposed as early as 1973 (RFC 561). Conversion from ARPANET to the Internet in the early 1980s produced the core of the current services. An email sent in the early 1970s looks quite similar to a basic text message sent on the Internet today.

Network-based email was initially exchanged on the ARPANET in extensions to the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), but is now carried by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published as Internet standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982. In the process of transporting email messages between systems, SMTP communicates delivery parameters using a message ''envelope'' separate from the message (header and body) itself.

Spelling

There are several (English) spelling options that occasionally prove cause for surprisingly vehement disagreement.

''email'' is the form required by IETF Requests for Comment and working groups and increasingly by style guides. This spelling also appears in most dictionaries. ''e-mail'' is a form previously recommended by some prominent journalistic and technical style guides. According to Corpus of Contemporary American English data, this form appears most frequently in edited, published American English writing. ''mail'' was the form used in the original RFC. The service is referred to as ''mail'' and a single piece of electronic mail is called a ''message''. ''eMail'', capitalizing only the letter ''M'', was common among ARPANET users and the early developers of Unix, CMS, AppleLink, eWorld, AOL, GEnie, and Hotmail. ''EMail'' is a traditional form that has been used in RFCs for the "Author's Address", and is expressly required "for historical reasons". ''E-mail'' is sometimes used, capitalizing the initial letter ''E'' as in similar abbreviations like ''A-bomb'', ''H-bomb'', and ''C-section''.

There is also some variety in the plural form of the term. In US English ''email'' is used as a mass noun (like the term ''mail'' for items sent through the postal system), but in British English it is more commonly used as a count noun with the plural ''emails''.

Origin

Precursors

Sending text messages electronically could be said to date back to the Morse code telegraph of the mid 1800s and at the 1939 New York World's Fair IBM sent a letter of congratulations from San Francisco to New York on an IBM radio-type, calling it a high-speed substitute for mail service in the world of tomorrow.Teleprinters were used in Germany during World War II and use spread until by the late 1960s there was a worldwide Telex network which remained important until the late 1980s.

Host-based mail systems

With the introduction of MIT's Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) in 1961 for the first time multiple users were able to log into a central system from remote dial-up terminals, and to store, and share, files on the central disk.

Informal methods of using this to pass messages developed—and were expanded to create the first true email system: MIT's CTSS MAIL, in 1965.

Other early time-sharing system soon had their own email applications: 1972 - Unix mail program 1972 - APL Mailbox by Larry Breed

1981 - PROFS by IBM

1982 - ALL-IN-1 by Digital Equipment Corporation

Although similar in concept, all these original email systems had widely different features and ran on incompatible systems. They allowed communication only between users logged into the same host or "mainframe" - although this could be hundreds or even thousands of users within an organization.

Email networks

Soon systems were developed to link compatible mail programs between different organisations over dialup modems or leased lines, creating local and global networks.

In 1971 the first ARPANET email was sent, and through RFC 561, RFC 680, RFC 724—and finally 1977's RFC 733, became a standardized working system.

Other separate networks were also being created including:

Unix mail was networked by 1978's uucp, which was also used for USENET newsgroup postings

IBM mainframe email was linked by BITNET in 1981

IBM PC's running DOS in 1984 could link with FidoNet for email and shared bulletin board posting

LAN email systems

In the early 1980s, networked personal computers on LANs became increasingly important. Server-based systems similar to the earlier mainframe systems were developed. Again these systems initially allowed communication only between users logged into the same server infrastructure. Examples include:

cc:Mail

Lantastic

WordPerfect Office

Microsoft Mail

Banyan VINES

Lotus Notes

Eventually these systems too could also be linked between different organizations, as long as they ran the same email system and proprietary protocol.

Attempts at interoperability

Early interoperability among independent systems included:

ARPANET, the forerunner of today's Internet, defined the first protocols for dissimilar computers to exchange email

uucp implementations for non-Unix systems were used as an open "glue" between differing mail systems, primarily over dialup telephones

CSNet used dial-up telephone access to link additional sites to the ARPANET and then Internet

Later efforts at interoperability standardization included:

Novell briefly championed the open MHS protocol but abandoned it after purchasing the non-MHS WordPerfect Office (renamed Groupwise)

The Coloured Book protocols on UK academic networks until 1992

X.400 in the 1980s and early 1990s was promoted by major vendors and mandated for government use under GOSIP but abandoned by all but a few — in favor of Internet SMTP by the mid-1990s.

From SNDMSG to MSG

In the early 1970s, Ray Tomlinson updated an existing utility called SNDMSG so that it could copy messages (as files) over the network. Lawrence Roberts, the project manager for the ARPANET development, took the idea of READMAIL, which dumped all "recent" messages onto the user's terminal, and wrote a program for TENEX in TECO macros called RD which permitted accessing individual messages. Barry Wessler then updated RD and called it NRD.

Marty Yonke combined rewrote NRD to include reading, access to SNDMSG for sending, and a help system, and called the utility WRD which was later known as BANANARD. John Vittal then updated this version to include message forwarding and an ''Answer'' command that automatically created a reply message with the correct address(es). This was the first email "reply" command; the system was called MSG. With inclusion of these features, MSG is considered to be the first integrated modern email program, from which many other applications have descended.

The rise of ARPANET mail

The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the development of email. There is one report that indicates experimental inter-system email transfers began shortly after its creation in 1969. Ray Tomlinson is generally credited as having sent the first email across a network, initiating the use of the "@" sign to separate the names of the user and the user's machine in 1971, when he sent a message from one Digital Equipment Corporation DEC-10 computer to another DEC-10. The two machines were placed next to each other. Tomlinson's work was quickly adopted across the ARPANET, which significantly increased the popularity of email. For many years, email was the killer app of the ARPANET and then the Internet.

Most other networks had their own email protocols and address formats; as the influence of the ARPANET and later the Internet grew, central sites often hosted email gateways that passed mail between the Internet and these other networks. Internet email addressing is still complicated by the need to handle mail destined for these older networks. Some well-known examples of these were UUCP (mostly Unix computers), BITNET (mostly IBM and VAX mainframes at universities), FidoNet (personal computers), DECNET (various networks) and CSNET a forerunner of NSFNet.

An example of an Internet email address that routed mail to a user at a UUCP host:

hubhost!middlehost!edgehost!user@uucpgateway.somedomain.example.com

This was necessary because in early years UUCP computers did not maintain (and could not consult central servers for) information about the location of all hosts they exchanged mail with, but rather only knew how to communicate with a few network neighbors; email messages (and other data such as Usenet News) were passed along in a chain among hosts who had explicitly agreed to share data with each other. (Eventually the UUCP Mapping Project would provide a form of network routing database for email.)

Operation overview

The diagram to the right shows a typical sequence of events that takes place when Alice composes a message using her mail user agent (MUA). She enters the email address of her correspondent, and hits the "send" button. 400px|How e-mail works # Her MUA formats the message in email format and uses the Submission Protocol (a profile of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), see RFC 4409) to send the message to the local mail submission agent (MSA), in this case smtp.a.org, run by Alice's internet service provider (ISP). # The MSA looks at the destination address provided in the SMTP protocol (not from the message header), in this case bob@b.org. An Internet email address is a string of the form localpart@exampledomain. 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 or a fully qualified domain name. The MSA resolves a domain name to determine the fully qualified domain name of the mail exchange server in the Domain Name System (DNS). # The DNS server for the b.org domain, 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 Bob's ISP. # 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). # The MDA delivers it to the mailbox of the user bob. # Bob presses the "get mail" button in his MUA, which picks up the message using either the Post Office Protocol (POP3) or the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP4).

That sequence of events applies to the majority of email users. However, there are many alternative possibilities and complications to 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 a 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 when the main mail exchange server is not available.

Email messages are not secure if email encryption is not used correctly.

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. If an MTA couldn't reach the destination, it could at least deliver it to a relay closer to the destination. The relay stood a better chance of delivering the message at a later time. However, this mechanism proved to be exploitable by people sending unsolicited bulk email and as a consequence very few modern MTAs are open mail relays, and many MTAs don't accept messages from open mail relays because such messages are very likely to be spam.

Message format

The Internet email message format is defined in RFC 5322, with multi-media content attachments being defined in RFC 2045 through RFC 2049, collectively called ''Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions'' or ''MIME''. Prior to the introduction of RFC 2822 in 2001, the format described by RFC 822 was the standard for Internet email for nearly 20 years. RFC 822 was published in 1982 and based on the earlier RFC 733 for the ARPANET (see).

Internet email messages consist of two major sections:

''Header'' — Structured into fields such as From, To, CC, Subject, Date, and other information about the email.

''Body'' — The basic content, as unstructured text; sometimes containing a signature block at the end. This is exactly the same as the body of a regular letter.

The header is separated from the body by a blank line.

Message header

Each message has exactly one header, which is structured into fields. Each field has a name and a value. RFC 5322 specifies the precise syntax.

Informally, each line of text in the header that begins with a printable character begins a separate field. The field name starts in the first character of the line and ends before the separator character ":". The separator is then followed by the field value (the "body" of the field). The value is continued onto subsequent lines if those lines have a space or tab as their first character. Field names and values are restricted to 7-bit ASCII characters. Non-ASCII values may be represented using MIME encoded words.

Header fields

The message header must include at least the following fields:

''From'': The email address, and optionally the name of the author(s). In many email clients not changeable except through changing account settings.

''Date'': The local time and date when the message was written. Like the ''From:'' field, many email clients fill this in automatically when sending. The recipient's client may then display the time in the format and time zone local to him/her.

The message header should include at least the following fields:

''Message-ID'': Also an automatically generated field; used to prevent multiple delivery and for reference in In-Reply-To: (see below).

''In-Reply-To'': Message-ID of the message that this is a reply to. Used to link related messages together. This field only applies for reply messages.

RFC 3864 describes registration procedures for message header fields at the IANA; it provides for permanent and provisional message header 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:".

''Bcc'': Blind Carbon Copy; addresses added to the SMTP delivery list but not (usually) listed in the message data, remaining invisible to other recipients.

''Cc'': Carbon copy; Many email clients will mark email in your inbox differently depending on whether you are in the To: or Cc: list.

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 that automated "vacation" or "out of office" responses should not be returned for this mail, e.g. to prevent vacation notices from being sent to all other subscribers of a mailinglist. Sendmail uses this header 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 once was. Microsoft Exchange respects a fine-grained automatic response suppression mechanism, the X-Auto-Response-Suppress header.

''Received'': Tracking information generated by mail servers that have previously handled a message, in reverse order (last handler first).

''References'': Message-ID of the message that this is a reply to, and the message-id of the message the previous reply was a reply to, etc.

''Reply-To'': Address that should be used to reply to the message.

''Sender'': Address of the actual 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 .

Note that the ''To:'' field is not necessarily related to the addresses to which the message is delivered. The actual delivery list is supplied separately to the transport protocol, SMTP, which may or may not originally have been extracted from the header content. The "To:" field is similar to the addressing at the top of a conventional letter which is delivered according to the address on the outer envelope. Also note that the "From:" field does not have to be the real sender of the email message. One reason is that it is very easy to fake the "From:" field and let a message seem to be from any mail address. It is possible to digitally sign email, which is much harder to fake, but such signatures require extra programming and often external programs to verify. Some ISPs do not relay email claiming to come from a domain not hosted by them, but very few (if any) check to make sure that the person or even email address named in the "From:" field is the one associated with the connection. Some ISPs apply email authentication systems to email being sent through their MTA to allow other MTAs to detect forged spam that might appear to come from them.

Recently the IETF EAI working group has defined some experimental extensions to allow Unicode characters to be used within the header. In particular, this allows email addresses to use non-ASCII characters. Such characters must only be used by servers that support these extensions.

Message body

Content encoding

Email was originally designed for 7-bit ASCII. Much 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 still do not support them fully. In some countries, several encoding schemes coexist; as the result, by default, the message in a non-Latin alphabet language appears in non-readable form (the only exception is coincidence, when 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 automatically generated plain text copy as well, for compatibility reasons.

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 web based Mailing lists recommend that all posts be made in plain-text, with 72 or 80 characters per line for all the above reasons, but also because they have a significant number of readers using text-based email clients such as Mutt.

Some Microsoft email clients allow rich formatting using RTF, but unless the recipient is guaranteed to have a compatible email client this should be avoided.

In order to ensure that HTML sent in an email is rendered properly by the recipient's client software, an additional header must be specified when sending: "Content-type: text/html". Most email programs send this header automatically.

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). 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. Webmail interfaces allow users to access their mail with any standard web browser, from any computer, rather than relying on an email client. Programs used by users for retrieving, reading, and managing email are called mail user agents (MUAs).

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.

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.

Filename extensions

Upon reception of email messages, email client applications save message 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: ;eml :Used by many email clients including Microsoft Outlook Express, Windows Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird. The files are plain text in MIME format, containing the email header as well as the message contents and attachments in one or more of several formats. ;emlx :Used by Apple Mail. ;msg :Used by Microsoft Office Outlook and OfficeLogic Groupware. ;mbx :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 mailto: 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.

Use

In society

There are numerous ways in which people have changed the way they communicate in the last 50 years; email is certainly one of them. Traditionally, social interaction in the local community was the basis for communication – face to face. Yet, today face-to-face meetings are no longer the primary way to communicate as one can use a landline telephone, mobile phones, fax services, or any number of the computer mediated communications such as email.

Flaming

Flaming occurs when a person sends a message with angry or antagonistic content. The term is derived from the use of the word Incendiary to describe particularly heated email discussions. Flaming is assumed to be more common today because of the ease and impersonality of email communications: confrontations in person or via telephone require direct interaction, where social norms encourage civility, whereas typing a message to another person is an indirect interaction, so civility may be forgotten. Flaming is generally looked down upon by Internet communities as it is considered rude and non-productive.

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 the email inbox is being cleared out. Harvard University law professor Lawrence Lessig is credited with coining this term, but he may only have popularized it.

In business

Email was widely accepted by the business community as the first broad electronic communication medium and was the first ‘e-revolution’ in business communication. Email is very simple to understand and like postal mail, email solves two basic problems of communication: logistics and synchronization (see below).

LAN based email is also an emerging form of usage for business. It not only allows the business user to download mail when ''offline'', it also allows the small business user to have multiple users' email IDs with just ''one email connection''.

Pros

''The problem of logistics'': Much of the business world relies upon 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 way to exchange information between two or more people with no set-up costs and that is generally far less expensive than physical meetings or phone calls.

''The problem of synchronisation'': With real time communication by meetings or phone calls, participants have to 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.

Cons

Most business workers today spend from one to two hours of their working day on email: reading, ordering, sorting, ‘re-contextualizing’ fragmented information, and writing email. The use of email is increasing due to increasing levels of globalisation—labour division and outsourcing amongst other things. Email can lead to some well-known problems:

''Loss of context'': which means that the context is lost forever; there is no way to get the text back. Information in context (as in a newspaper) is much easier and faster to understand than unedited and sometimes unrelated fragments of information. Communicating in context can only be achieved when both parties have a full understanding of the context and issue in question.

''Information overload'': Email is a push technology—the sender controls who receives the information. Convenient availability of mailing lists and use of "copy all" can lead to people receiving unwanted or irrelevant information of no use to them.

''Inconsistency'': Email can duplicate information. This can be a problem when a large team is working on documents and information while not in constant contact with the other members of their team.

''Liability''. Statements made in an email can be deemed legally binding and be used against a party in a Court of law.

Despite these disadvantages, email has become the most widely used medium of communication within the business world. In fact, a 2010 study on workplace communication, found that 83% of U.S. knowledge workers felt that email was critical to their success and productivity at work.

Problems

Attachment size limitation

Email messages may have one or more attachments. Attachments serve the purpose of delivering binary or text files of unspecified size. In principle there is no technical intrinsic restriction in the SMTP protocol limiting the size or number of attachments. In practice, however, email service providers implement various limitations on the permissible size of files or the size of an entire message.

Furthermore, due to technical reasons, often a small attachment can increase in size when sent, which can be confusing to senders when trying to assess whether they can or cannot send a file by email, and this can result in their message being rejected.

As larger and larger file sizes are being created and traded, many users are either forced to upload and download their files using an FTP server, or more popularly, use online file sharing facilities or services, usually over web-friendly HTTP, in order to send and receive them.

Information overload

A December 2007 New York Times blog post described information overload as "a $650 Billion Drag on the Economy", and the New York Times reported in April 2008 that "E-MAIL has become the bane of some people’s professional lives" due to information overload, yet "none of the current wave of high-profile Internet start-ups focused on e-mail really eliminates the problem of e-mail overload because none helps us prepare replies". GigaOm posted a similar article in September 2010, highlighting research that found 57% of knowledge workers were overwhelmed by the volume of email they received. Technology investors reflect similar concerns.

Spamming and computer viruses

The usefulness of email is being threatened by four phenomena: email bombardment, spamming, phishing, and email worms.

Spamming is unsolicited commercial (or bulk) email. Because of the very low cost of sending email, spammers can send hundreds of millions of email messages each day over an inexpensive Internet connection. Hundreds of active spammers sending this volume of mail results in information overload for many computer users who receive voluminous unsolicited email each day.

Email worms use email as a way of replicating themselves into vulnerable computers. Although the first email worm affected UNIX computers, the problem is most common today on the more popular Microsoft Windows operating system...

The combination of spam and worm programs results in users receiving a constant drizzle of junk email, which reduces the usefulness of email as a practical tool.

A number of anti-spam techniques mitigate the impact of spam. In the United States, U.S. Congress has also passed a law, the Can Spam Act of 2003, attempting to regulate such email. Australia also has very strict spam laws restricting the sending of spam from an Australian ISP, but its impact has been minimal since most spam comes from regimes that seem reluctant to regulate the sending of spam.

Email spoofing

Email spoofing occurs when the header information of an email is altered to make the message appear to come from a known or trusted source. It is often used as a ruse to collect personal information.

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 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.

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 anonymity 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, attached files share many of the same hazards as those found in peer-to-peer filesharing. Attached files may contain trojans or viruses.

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. (A complete Message Tracking mechanism was also defined, but it never gained traction; see RFCs 3885 through 3888.)

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 so is available to be spammed

If the spammer uses a forged sender email address (E-mail 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

There are a number of systems that allow the sender to see if messages have been opened. The receiver could also let the sender know that the emails have been opened through an "Okay" button. A check sign can appear in the sender's screen when the receiver's "Okay" button is pressed.

US Government

The US Government has been involved in email in several different ways.

Starting in 1977, the US Postal Service (USPS) recognized that electronic mail and electronic transactions posed a significant threat to First Class mail volumes and revenue. Therefore, the USPS initiated an experimental email service known as E-COM. Electronic messages were transmitted to a post office, printed out, and delivered as hard copy. To take advantage of the service, an individual had to transmit at least 200 messages. The delivery time of the messages was the same as First Class mail and cost 26 cents. Both the Postal Regulatory Commission and the Federal Communications Commission opposed E-COM. The FCC concluded that E-COM constituted common carriage under its jurisdiction and the USPS would have to file a tariff. Three years after initiating the service, USPS canceled E-COM and attempted to sell it off.

The early ARPANET dealt with multiple email clients that had various, and at times incompatible, formats. For example, in the Multics, the "@" sign meant "kill line" and anything before the "@" sign was ignored, so Multics users had to use a command-line option to specify the destination system. The Department of Defense DARPA desired to have uniformity and interoperability for email and therefore funded efforts to drive towards unified inter-operable standards. This led to David Crocker, John Vittal, Kenneth Pogran, and Austin Henderson publishing RFC 733, "Standard for the Format of ARPA Network Text Message" (November 21, 1977), which was apparently not effective. In 1979, a meeting was held at BBN to resolve incompatibility issues. Jon Postel recounted the meeting in RFC 808, "Summary of Computer Mail Services Meeting Held at BBN on 10 January 1979" (March 1, 1982), which includes an appendix listing the varying email systems at the time. This, in turn, lead to the release of David Crocker's RFC 822, "Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages" (August 13, 1982).

The National Science Foundation took over operations of the ARPANET and Internet from the Department of Defense, and initiated NSFNet, a new backbone for the network. A part of the NSFNet AUP forbade commercial traffic. In 1988, Vint Cerf arranged for an interconnection of MCI Mail with NSFNET on an experimental basis. The following year Compuserve email interconnected with NSFNET. Within a few years the commercial traffic restriction was removed from NSFNETs AUP, and NSFNET was privatised.

In the late 1990s, the Federal Trade Commission grew concerned with fraud transpiring in email, and initiated a series of procedures on spam, fraud, and phishing. In 2004, FTC jurisdiction over spam was codified into law in the form of the CAN SPAM Act. Several other US Federal Agencies have also exercised jurisdiction including the Department of Justice and the Secret Service.

NASA has provided email capabilities to astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle and Internationals Space Station since 1991 when a Macintosh Portable was used aboard Space Shuttle mission STS-43 to send the first email via AppleLink. Today astronauts aboard the International Space Station have email capabilities through the via wireless networking throughout the station and are connected to the ground at 3 Mbit/s Earth to station and 10 Mbit/s station to Earth, comparable to home DSL connection speeds.

See also

Email terminologies

Email encryption

HTML email

Internet fax

L- or letter mail, e-mail letter and letter e-mail

Privacy-enhanced Electronic Mail

Push email

X-Originating-IP

Email social issues

Anti-spam techniques (e-mail)

CompuServe (first consumer service)

Computer virus

E-card

E-mail art

E-mail jamming

E-mail spam

E-mail spoofing

E-mail storm

E-mail subject abbreviations

Information overload

Internet humor

Internet slang

Netiquette

Usenet quoting

Clients and servers

Biff

Email address

Email authentication

Email client, Comparison of email clients

Email hosting service

Internet mail standards

Mail transfer agent

Mail user agent

Unicode and e-mail

Webmail

Mailing list

Anonymous remailer

Disposable e-mail address

Email digest

E-mail encryption

E-mail tracking

Electronic mailing list

Mailer-Daemon

Mailing list archive

History

Telegraphy

Lexigram

Protocols

IMAP

POP3

SMTP

UUCP

X400

References

Further reading

Cemil Betanov, ''Introduction to X.400'', Artech House, ISBN 0-89006-597-7.

Lawrence Hughes, ''Internet e-mail Protocols, Standards and Implementation'', Artech House Publishers, ISBN 0-89006-939-5.

Kevin Johnson, ''Internet Email Protocols: A Developer's Guide'', Addison-Wesley Professional, ISBN 0-201-43288-9.

Pete Loshin, ''Essential Email Standards: RFCs and Protocols Made Practical'', John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-34597-0.

Sara Radicati, ''Electronic Mail: An Introduction to the X.400 Message Handling Standards'', Mcgraw-Hill, ISBN 0-07-051104-7.

John Rhoton, ''Programmer's Guide to Internet Mail: SMTP, POP, IMAP, and LDAP'', Elsevier, ISBN 1-55558-212-5.

John Rhoton, ''X.400 and SMTP: Battle of the E-mail Protocols'', Elsevier, ISBN 1-55558-165-X.

David Wood, ''Programming Internet Mail'', O'Reilly, ISBN 1-56592-479-7.

Yoram M. Kalman & Sheizaf Rafaeli, Online Pauses and Silence: Chronemic Expectancy Violations in Written Computer-Mediated Communication, ''Communication Research'', Vol. 38, pp. 54–69, 2011

External links

IANA's list of standard header fields

The History of Electronic Mail is a personal memoir by the implementer of an early email system

Category:Email Category:Internet terminology Category:American inventions Category:Electronic documents Category:History of the Internet

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This is a list of people whose names in English are commonly appended with the phrase "''the Great''", or who were called that or an equivalent phrase in their own language. Other languages have their own suffixes such as ''e Bozorg'' and ''e azam'' in Persian and Urdu respectively.

In Persia, the title "the Great" at first seems to be a colloquial version of the Old Persian title "Great King". This title was first used by the conqueror Cyrus II of Persia.

The Persian title was inherited by Alexander III of Macedon (336–323 BC) when he conquered the Persian Empire, and the epithet "Great" eventually became personally associated with him. The first reference (in a comedy by Plautus) assumes that everyone knew who "Alexander the Great" was; however, there is no earlier evidence that Alexander III of Macedon was called "''the Great''".

The early Seleucid kings, who succeeded Alexander in Persia, used "Great King" in local documents, but the title was most notably used for Antiochus the Great (223–187 BC).

Later rulers and commanders began to use the epithet "the Great" as a personal name, like the Roman general Pompey. Others received the surname retrospectively, like the Carthaginian Hanno and the Indian emperor Ashoka the Great. Once the surname gained currency, it was also used as an honorific surname for people without political careers, like the philosopher Albert the Great.

As there are no objective criteria for "greatness", the persistence of later generations in using the designation greatly varies. For example, Louis XIV of France was often referred to as "The Great" in his lifetime but is rarely called such nowadays, while Frederick II of Prussia is still called "The Great". A later Hohenzollern - Wilhelm I - was often called "The Great" in the time of his grandson Wilhelm II, but rarely later.

Rulers

Abbas I of Persia (1571-1629), Shah of Iran

Akbar (1542-1605), ruler of the Mughal Empire of South Asia, mainly India

Alain I of Albret (1440-1522), French aristocrat

Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), King of Macedonia, Persia, Greece, Egypt, and all of Mesopotamia

Alexander I of Georgia (1386–1446), King of Georgia

Alfonso III of León (c. 848-910), King of León, Galicia and Asturias

Alfred the Great (848/849-899), King of Wessex

Antiochus III the Great (c. 241–187 BC), ruler of the Seleucid Empire

Ashoka the Great (c. 304–232 BC), Indian emperor of the Maurya dynasty

Ashot I of Iberia “the Great”(died 826/830), presiding prince of Iberia (modern Georgia),

Askia Mohammad I (c. 1442–1538), ruler of the Songhai Empire

Bhumibol Adulyadej (born 1927), King of Thailand

Bolesław I Chrobry (967-1025), sometimes called "the Great", first King of Poland

Bruno the Great (925–965), Archbishop of Cologne and Duke of Lotharingia (also listed in the following section)

Buddha Yodfa Chulaloke (1736-1809), founder and ruler of the Rattanakosin Kingdom (in what is now Thailand)

Cnut the Great (c. 985 or 995-1035), King of Denmark, England, Norway and parts of Sweden

Casimir III the Great (1310-1370), King of Poland

Catherine the Great (1729-1796), Empress of Russian

Chandragupta II (reigned 375-413/415), also known as Vikramaditya, ruler of the Gupta empire in India

Charlemagne (died 814), King of the Franks and Emperor of the Romans

Chulalongkorn (1853-1910), King of Siam (now Thailand)

Chlothar II (584-629), King of Neustria and King of the Franks

Conrad, Margrave of Meissen (c. 1097-1157), Margrave of Meissen

Constantine I (c. 272-337), Roman Emperor

Cyrus the Great (c. 600 BC or 576 BC–530 BC), founder and ruler of the Persian or Achaemenid Empire

Darius the Great (550 – 486 BC), third ruler of the Persian Empire

Devapala (died 850), ruler of the Pala Empire in the Indian subcontinent

Dionysius I, Greek tyrant of Syracuse

Ferdinand I of León and Castile (c. 1015–1065), King of León and Count of Castile

Frederick the Great (1712-1786), King of Prussia

Genghis Khan (1162?-1227), founder and Great Khan of the Mongol Empire

Gero (c. 900–965), ruler of Marca Geronis, a very large march in Europe

Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden (1594-1632), King of Sweden, founder of the Swedish Empire, and noted military leader

Gwanggaeto the Great, King of Goguryeo, one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea

Hanno the Great, the name of three leaders of Carthage, in the 4th, 3rd, and 2nd centuries BC

Henry I, Duke of Burgundy (946–1002)

Henry IV of France (1553-1610), King of France and King of Navarre

Herod the Great (73/74 BC-4 BC), King of Judea

Hugh the Great (898-956), Duke of the Franks and Count of Paris

Hugh Magnus of France (1007-1025), co-King of France

Hugh I, Count of Vermandois (1057-1101)

Humphrey I de Bohun (died c. 1123), Anglo-Norman aristocrat

Ivan III of Russia (1440-1505), Tsar of Russia

John I of Portugal (1358-1433), King of Portugal and the Algarve

John II of Aragon (1398-1479), King of Aragon and, through his wife, King of Navarre

Justinian I (483-565), Byzantine Emperor

Kamehameha I (c. 1758-1819), first King of Hawai'i

Kanishka (died c. 127), ruler of the Kushan Empire in Central Asia and parts of India

Kvirike III of Kakheti (1010-1029), King of Kakheti in eastern Georgia

Kublai Khan (1215-1294), Mongol ruler in the 13th century and Emperor of China; founder of the Yuan Dynasty

Llywelyn the Great (c. 1172–1240), Prince of Gwynedd and de facto ruler of most of Wales

Louis I of Hungary (1326-1382), King of Hungary, Croatia and Poland

Mangrai the Great (1238-1317), Lanna, northern Thailand

Emperor Meiji (1852-1912), Emperor of Japan

Mircea I of Wallachia (1355–1418)

Mithridates II of Parthia (died 88 BC), ruler of the Parthian Empire (in present day Iran)

Mithridates VI of Pontus (134 BC–63 BC), ruler of Pontus and the Bosporan Kingdom

Mstislav I of Kiev (1076-1132), Grand Prince of Kievan Rus

Narai (1633-1688), King of Ayutthaya (in what is now modern Thailand)

Naresuan (1555-1605), King of Ayutthaya

Odo the Great (died c. 735), Duke of Aquitaine

Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor (912-973)

K'inich Janaab' Pakal (603-683), ruler of the Mayan city-state of Palenque

Parakramabahu I of Polonnaruwa (1123–1186), King of Sri Lanka

Peter Krešimir IV of Croatia (died 1075), King of Croatia

Peter the Great (1672-1725), Tsar of Russia

Peter III of Aragon (1239-1285), King of Aragon and King of Sicily

Pompey (106 BC-48 BC), military and political leader of the late Roman Republic, rival of Julius Caesar

Radama I (1793–1828), first king of greater Madagascar

Raja Raja Chola I (c. 947-1014), Indian emperor of the Cholas.

Rajendra Chola I (reigned 1014-1044), Tamil King of India

Ramesses II (reigned 1279 BC – 1213 BC), considered the greatest pharaoh of Ancient Egypt

Ram Khamhaeng (around 1237 to 1247-1298), King of Sukhothai (in present day Thailand)

Ramon Berenguer III, Count of Barcelona (1082-1131), also Count of Provence and various other counties

Rhodri the Great (c. 820–878), King of Gwynedd (in present day Wales)

Roman the Great (after 1160-1205), Grand Prince of Kiev

Samudragupta (c. 335–375), ruler of the Gupta empire in the Indian subcontinent

Sancho III of Navarre (c. 992-1035), King of Kingdom of Navarre

Sargon of Akkad (died c. 2215 BC), ruler of the Akkadian Empire

Sejong the Great (1397-1450), Korean king

Shapur II (309-379), king of the Sassanid Empire, Persia

Simeon I of Bulgaria (864/865-927), ruler of the First Bulgarian Empire

Stephen III of Moldavia (1433-1504), Prince of Moldavia (Romania)

Stephen Uroš IV Dušan of Serbia (c. 1308-1355), King of Serbia and Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks

Taksin (1734-1782), King of the Thonburi Kingdom (Thailand)

Timur (1336-1405), better known as Tamerlane, founder of the Timurid Dynasty

Theobald II, Count of Champagne (1090–1151), Count of Blois and of Chartres as Theobald IV, Count of Champagne and of Brie

Theodoric the Great (454-526), King of the Ostrogoths, regent of the Visigoths and a viceroy of the Byzantine Empire

Theodosius I (347-395), Roman emperor

Tigranes the Great (140-55 BC), Emperor of Armenia

Tiridates III of Armenia (285-339), King of Armenia

Umar (c. 586 to 590–644), second caliph of the Muslim Empire

Valdemar I of Denmark (1131-1182), King of Denmark

Valentinian I (364-375), Roman Emperor

Vladimir I of Kiev (c. 958-1015), ruler of Kievan Rus

Vytautas (c. 1350-1430), archduke of the Lithuanian Grand Duchy

William I, Count of Burgundy (1020-1087), Count of Burgandy and Mâcon

William V, Duke of Aquitaine (969-1030), also Count of Poitou

Xerxes I (519-465 BC), King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire (Persia)

Yu the Great (c. 2200-2100 BC), legendary ruler in ancient China

Religious figures

Abraham the Great of Kashkar (ca. 492-586), monk and saint of the Assyrian Church of the East

Abraham Kidunaia (died c. 366, hermit, priest, and Christian saint of Mesopotamia

Albertus Magnus (1193/1206–1280), medieval German philosopher and theologian

Anthony the Great (c. 251–356), early Christian saint of Egypt

Babai the Great (c. 551–628), Assyrian church leader

Basil of Caesarea (330-379), Greek bishop and theologian

Bruno the Great (925–965), Archbishop of Cologne and Duke of Lotharingia (also listed in the previous section)

Euthymius the Great (377-473), abbot and Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox saint

Gertrude the Great (1256-c. 1302), German Benedictine, mystic, theologian and Roman Catholic saint

Pope Gregory I (c. 540-604)

Hiyya the Great, 3rd-century rabbi, Palestine

Pope John Paul II (1920-2005)

Pope Leo I (c. 391 or 400-461)

Macarius of Egypt (c. 300-391), Egyptian hermit

Pope Nicholas I (c. 800-867)

Photius I of Constantinople (c. 810–c. 893), Eastern Orthodox saint and Patriarch of Constantinople

William of Maleval (died 1157), founder of the Catholic congregation of Williamites

Other

Beli Mawr, a figure in medieval Welsh literature and genealogies

Emmy the Great, folk singer

Matteo Rosso the Great, Roman politician and father of Pope Nicholas III

Prokop the Great, Hussite general in Bohemia

See also

Epithet

List of monarchs by nickname

List of nicknames of European Royalty and Nobility: G-I

James, son of Zebedee, also known as James the Greater, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus

Ajax (mythology), called Ajax the Greater

Notes

Category:Monarchs Great, List of people known as The Category:Greatest Nationals Category:Epithets

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