All are invited to a Networked Systems Tech Talk by Robert Ismo, founder of Machine Telecom and Agency Economy, on Thursday, October 15, 2026, at 11:25 a.m. – 12:40 p.m. in the Stuart Building (room 113). The talk is titled “Mail Security Over the Last Forty Years.”

More about the talk series: http://www.cs.iit.edu/~nsultana1/techtalks/

Abstract

Email is the most widely used messaging technology on the internet; however, it was built for a completely different era of technology and trust. This talk will walk through a brief history of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and dive into the technologies that secure it. We will demonstrate the need for domain authentication, the sender policy framework, and spam prevention, and how these are implemented in an existing mail server (Postfix).

Biography

Robert Ismo is the founder of Machine Telecom, a Chicago-based startup company building mail technology. He is also the president of Agency Economy, a local non-profit with the goal of helping young people improve their relationship with technology through tech ownership. He has self-hosted his personal mail server for five years.