The UW was one of three schools awarded a $100,000 Mellon award for Technology Collaboration, for development of the e-mail program Pine and the IMAP mail server.

Seven other schools received $50,000 awards.

According to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Web site, the award honors development of technology that enables scholarly and not-for profit endeavors; it also requires that the software is the product of collaboration between institutions.

Decades of development of the open-source IMAP and Pine made e-mail easier for a generation of universities and non-profits, according to the site.

"The Mellon award is really honoring UW's contribution to all aspects of Internet-based electronic mail and our philosophy of sharing tools — an ideal that was pioneered in research universities and eventually evolved into today's Open Source Software movement," said Terry Gray, associate vice president of technology engineering computing & communications.

Pine was developed in close collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University.

Pine, which stands for Program for Internet News and Email, was first called FUMP — for Friendly User Mail Program, said Laurence Lundblade, who came up with its final name.

"That clearly didn't fly, so we chose Pine cause it was in the Northwest, and there were a lot of pine trees, and it had to be named after a tree because it was based on another e-mail program called ELM," Lundblade said.

In 1989, when development of Pine first began, there were no e-mail programs that let you send and read e-mails with as much flexibility.

"For example, you can, with just a few keystrokes, save into a new folder all the messages that have the word 'butter' in the subject, or elsewhere in the message. Although the capability for marking messages as 'important,' or tagging them with certain keywords, is common in mail programs today, it was not common when first implemented in Pine," Gray said.

The Mellon award alsonoted UW'sdevelopment of the IMAP protocol. IMAP, which stands for Internet Message Access Protocol, allows access to e-mail from different computers at different times; IMAP also allows a user to mark or tag messages and save them into separate folders, Gray said.

"Prior to the advent of IMAP, the more primitive Post Office Protocol (POP) was the only choice. POP was designed for people who use a single computer and wish to download all their messages from their mail drop server to that one computer," Gray said.

Now, IMAP is the protocol used by e-mail programs like Outlook Express and Mozilla Thunderbird, he said.

The award money will go toward a complete redesign of the interface of WebPine, the UW's most used e-mail service, Gray said.

Contact reporter Tia Ghose at tiaghose@thedaily.washington.edu