Mark Crispin

Mark Reed Crispin (born July 19, 1956, in Camden, New Jersey; died 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.