Mark Crispin

Mark Reed Crispin (July 19, 1956 in Camden, New Jersey – December 28, 2012 in Poulsbo, Washington) is best known as the father of the IMAP protocol, having invented it in 1985 during his time at the Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory. He is the author or co-author of numerous RFCs; and is the principal author of UW IMAP, one of the reference implementations of the IMAP4rev1 protocol described in RFC 3501. He also designed the mix mail storage format.

Crispin earned a B.S. in Technology and Society from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1977.

From 1977 to 1988, he was a Systems Programmer at Stanford University. He developed the first production PDP-10 32-bit address ARPAnet NCP for the WAITS operating system, and wrote or rewrote most of the WAITS ARPAnet protocol suite. Prior to that time most systems only supported the original 8-bit addresses. During that time, he wrote the infamous RFC 748, the only document specifically marked in the RFC index with note date of issue; and a series of Telnet implementations for the Incompatible Timesharing System, WAITS, and TOPS-20 operating systems whose escape behavior was playfully immortalized by Guy Steele in the April 1984 Communications of the ACM as The Telnet Song.

In the early 1980s, shortly after becoming the Systems Programmer for the Stanford Computer Science Department's TOPS-20 system, he became interested in electronic mail software and systems; thereafter this became his primary focus. He became the principal developer of the TOPS-20 mailsystem, and reportedly was still running TOPS-20 systems at his residence in 2009. It was at Stanford, in the 1985–88 period, that IMAP was first developed.

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