Editing FidoNet (section)

===Echomail===
Sometime during the evolution of Fido, [[email attachment|file attachments]] were added to the system, allowing a file to be referenced from an email message. During the normal exchange between two instances of FIDONET, any files attached to the messages in the packets were delivered after the packet itself had been up or downloaded. It is not clear when this was added, but it was already a feature of the basic system when the 8 February 1985 version of the FidoNet standards document was released, so this was added very early in Fido's history.

At a [[sysop]] meeting in Dallas, the idea was raised that it would be nice if there was some way for the sysops to post messages that would be shared among the systems.<ref name=wagner>{{citation |url=http://www.rxn.com/~net282/fidonet.wagner.echomail.txt |title=History of Echomail |author=Wynn Wagner |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160210034936/http://www.rxn.com/~net282/fidonet.wagner.echomail.txt |url-status=dead |date=July 1985 |archive-date=2016-02-10 |access-date=2021-12-04}}</ref> In February 1986 Jeff Rush, one of the group members, introduced a new mailer that extracted messages from public forums that the sysop selected, similar to the way the original mailer handled private messages. The new program was known as a ''tosser/scanner''. The tosser produced a file that was similar (or identical) to the output from the normal netmail scan, but these files were then compressed and attached to a normal netmail message as an attachment. This message was then sent to a special address on the remote system. After receiving netmail as normal, the scanner on the remote system looked for these messages, unpacked them, and put them into the same public forum on the original system.<ref name=randy>Randy Bush, [http://www.fidonet.org/inet92_Randy_Bush.txt "FidoNet: Technology, Use, Tools, and History"], 1992</ref>

In this fashion, Rush's system implemented a store and forward public message system similar to [[Usenet]], but based on, and hosted by, the FidoNet system. The first such ''echomail'' forum was one created by the Dallas area sysops to discuss business, known as SYSOP. Another called TECH soon followed. Several public ''echos'' soon followed, including GAYNET and CLANG. These spawned hundreds of new echos, and led to the creation of the Echomail Conference List (Echolist) by Thomas Kenny in January 1987.<ref name=robbins>Frank Robbins, [http://elsmar.com/pdf_files/fidonet-info.txt "FidoNet History Timeline"]</ref> Echomail produced world-spanning shared forums, and its traffic volume quickly surpassed the original netmail system. By the early 1990s, echo mail was carrying over 8 MB of compressed message traffic a day, many times that when uncompressed.<ref name=randy/>

Echomail did not necessarily use the same distribution pathways as normal netmail, and the distribution routing was stored in a separate setup file not unlike the original ROUTES.BBS. At the originating site a header line was added to the message indicating the origin system's name and address. After that, each system that the message traveled through added itself to a growing PATH header, as well as a SEENBY header. SEENBY prevented the message from looping around the network in the case of misconfigured routing information.<ref name=randy/>

Echomail was not the only system to use the file attachment feature of netmail to implement store-and-forward capabilities. Similar concepts were used by online games and other systems as well.