The History of Email

The Invention of Email

Most people will credit Ray Tomlinson with the invention of email in 1971. He first came up with the idea of email while working for a government-funded research project, ARPANET, which would eventually become the internet. At that time, it was only possible to leave messages from somebody else if you were using the same computer. Tomlinson created a program that allowed users to send messages between different computers connected to the ARPANET system. Some of his contributions to email are still around today, including the use of the @ symbol in email addresses. In 2016, Ray Tomlinson passed away, but he lived to see his idea become something that the world would now struggle to live without.

In 1976, email was used by the first head of state, Queen Elizabeth II. She used the ARPANET electronic mail program when visiting the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment. She was given the username ‘HME2’. The same year, Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign became the first to use email.

By 1978, spam emails had become a thing. It didn’t take very long for somebody to figure out a way they could earn money through email. The ‘father of spam’, Gary Thurek, sent an unsolicited email marketing message to hundreds of ARPANET users, promoting a new Digital Equipment Corporation product, for which he claimed the email earned him $13m in sales.

When was Email Invented?

While Roy Tomlinson often gets the credit for inventing email, there is a long-standing debate regarding who invented it. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai says that as a fourteen-year-old, he created a program that is the true first version of email. It was called ‘EMAIL’ and was an interoffice software program designed for the University of Medicine and Dentistry. Although it’s highly contested that he was actually the inventor of email, it is possible that he came up with the term that we all know today.

Email Gets Simpler

In 1982, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) was introduced to standardise how messages are sent and received by mail servers. SMTP is partially based on Tomlinson’s SNDMSG program that he created at ARPANET. Today, email clients use SMTP to send messages to mail servers before sending them to recipients. Further into the mid-1980s, other protocols, such as the Post Office Protocol (POP) and the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), would begin to emerge.

Microsoft and Email

In 1988, Microsoft released MSMail, the first commercially available email product. Versions for both PC and Macintosh computers were released, and this program is seen as the predecessor for Exchange and Outlook programs.

When Did Email Start?

While email was invented and developed a lot throughout the 70s and 80s, it wasn’t until the end of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s that it really started for many people, thanks to AOL and Elwood Edwards, the guy behind the ‘You’ve Got Mail’ notification. But you might not know that, at the time, his wife worked at AOL. Edwards’s wife asked if he could record his voice saying a few words, which he did in his living room, and the rest is history. But, despite the famous recording, he didn’t get rich from it – reportedly, he was an Uber driver in 2016, and occasionally people still recognise his voice.

Email Advancements in the ’90s

In the early 1990s, email advanced further and became more than just text. In 1992, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) was introduced, allowing email to become much more flexible and supporting text in character sets outside of just ASCII. It also allowed email users to include multimedia attachments in their emails, such as audio, images, and videos. Also, in 1992, CompuServe allowed users to format emails without any code knowledge. This early ISP introduced an editor for both email and online forms that allowed emoticons, different colours, and different fonts.

Webmail Becomes Available

Email’s history moved so quickly from the 90s onwards that it can be easy to overlook the fact that for quite a while, you had to download and use a specific software program to be able to send or receive emails. In 1993, the first webmail version was built by Phillip Hallam-Baker, who worked for CERN as a cybersecurity expert. However, this version was not released to the public as it was only ever a test. By 1996, the idea of accessing your email from any computer using an internet connection was gaining traction. In the mid-90s, ISPs started bundling webmail options into their offerings. The first free webmail services were RocketMail, which would later become Yahoo! Mail, and Hotmail, which is still around today.

The History of Spam Emails

While email became an inexpensive and easy way to reach the masses, spam mail also became a regrettable side effect of this rather quickly. Unwanted email messages from shady companies became a huge problem, and by 1998, spam was a word that was added to the New Oxford Dictionary, alongside several other internet-related terms. By 1999, the status quo was challenged. Seth Godin from the Yoyodyne agency believed there was a way to effectively and responsibly use email for marketing by building a list of subscribers who actually wanted to hear from you. He published Permission Marketing, a book on his strategy, and is now in the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame, although this got him kicked out of the Direct Marketing Association at the time.

In 2003, the CAN-SPAM Act was signed into law in the US over thirty years after the invention of email by George W. Bush.

Email and Smartphones

Smartphones might not have been as popular as they were today back in 2002, but some early adopters loved their BlackBerrys, a smartphone brand that became hugely popular thanks to its primary focus on making email mobile. The BlackBerry 5810, released in 2002, was the first mobile device marketed as a mobile phone with email capabilities.

By 2010, emails on smartphones had become commonplace, and the Apple iPhone 4 had become a big hit. By this point, smartphones had become a must-have for most people, which presented another challenge for email marketers, who now had to consider how they were going to ensure that email campaigns were mobile-friendly. In 2010, the idea of designing and developing emails that were responsive began to emerge. Since then, we’ve gotten to a point where around half, if not more than half, of all emails, are now opened on mobile devices.

Protecting Data Privacy

By 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation in the UK and EU, along with other privacy legislation such as the California Consumer Privacy Act in the US, were starting to cause headaches for some email marketers, but also encouraging them to do a better job. By 2018, most people were actively avoiding email marketing messages and ignoring the massive daily influx of emails they received. With these new regulations in place, it became more important than ever for marketers to convince people to opt-in to receive emails from them, and permission marketing, which was shunned just a couple of decades ago, became the norm.

The COVID19 Pandemic

Despite being around for almost five decades at this point, 2020 was a year that made drastic changes to email. Email was crucial for crisis communication and working remote jobs. It also became used for non-marketing purposes once again with the shift to remote work, online learning, and an increase in eCommerce.

When Was the First Email Sent?

Email certainly has a rich and interesting history, and fifty years in, there are people all over the world sending emails on a daily basis. We often forget that this form of communication has not been around forever, and it’s easy to admit that most of us take it for granted. But when was the first email sent? Well, we have the inventor of email, Ray Tomlinson, to thank for that. He sent the first email in 1971, using the ARPANET program as a personal side project to his regular work. But for such a ground-breaking moment, he has actually forgotten what he wrote and thinks it was something boring and forgettable, like ‘QWERTYIOP’.

Whether you use email every day as a consumer, a business owner, an email marketer, an employee, or for personal communications, it’s now been over fifty years since this essential form of communication we all rely on today was invented.