Email is celebrating 50 years of its existence. It has been an incredible journey! How so? Well, we had a little interview with the emails. How they feel about the whole new world of digital platforms that are offering many channels to communicate. Email answered very proudly “we are here to stay!”

The digital technology is constantly evolving and trends are rapidly changing. Despite of this, email is the most preferred medium of communication. Did you know? Interactive Emails increases engagement by 73%. The direct mailer offers one-on-one communication, promotions, offers, transparency and everything that a brand needs to stay connected with its audience.

Let’s flashback into the history to mark the major milestones of the emails!

1971– The first email was sent

Ray Tomlinson sent first email to himself. The first email message said “Test 123” or QWERTYUIOP”. Tomilson was a programmer working on MIT’s ARPANET project. The invention of the email was something that he was working on as a personal project to his commissioned work.

Today email is celebrating 50 years.

1972- The first email management system developed

Lary Roberts wrote the first mail management software. Tt included the capabilities to sort the email headers by subject and date, giving users the authority to order the messages in their inbox. Furthermore, it allowed to read, save or delete messages in the order as per their convenience.

1978- The first email blast was sent

Gary Thuerk was the first sender of sending an email blast to 400 recipients as a promotion for his company’s computers. As a result, the sales jumped to $13 million. He worked for Digital Equipment Corp. This email was also considered as the first spam message

1988- The first Microsoft Mail product was introduced 

Microsoft developed and released  Internet mail for AppleTalk Networks. Later, in 1991 it released the second version for PC architecture-based LANs. At the same time, HTML was introduced to add characters to emails using fonts, graphics, colours, etc to make the emails more aesthetically pleasing.

1996- HoTMaiL was launched 

That’s right, HTML in uppercase in HoTMail. It was the first free web-based mail service with unlimited storage. The launch tagline “Get your free e-mail at Hotmail” attracted 20 million American users. In 1997, Microsoft purchased Hotmail for $400 million and changed the name to MSN Hotmail.

1999- BlackBerry Emails changed the game

Email-pager service launched by Blackberry changed the way emails were accessed. BlackBerry 850 was the first device to integrate emails. Blackberry started to gain a huge market share and then began to offer email service on non-BlackBerry devices, such as the Palm Treo, through the proprietary BlackBerry Connect software.

2004- Google launched Gmail on Fool’s day

Google’s Paul Buchheit developed Gmail. There were many rumours during its testing phase as Google was known for April Fool’s jokes. When Google made a public release, Google’s vice-president of products, was quoted by BBC News as saying, “We are very serious about Gmail”.

Do you remember when Gmail was launched, it was “by invitation” only? This wasn’t because it was premium or so. Gmail ran on old Pentium III infrastructure which was just sufficient enough for a beta launch to 1000 opinion leaders who then would invite their family and friends.

2015- Emails on Smartphones

Emails continued to play a major role to take part in online services via smartphones in 2015. 88% of smartphone owners used emails on their phones, making email a widely used smartphone feature than social networking

2020- 3.9 Billion email users in World

Nearly 50% of the world population uses emails. 73% of millennials prefer emails as the main source of business communication. While roughly 281 billion emails were sent and received each day in 2018, the figure is expected to increase to over 347 billion daily emails in 2022

Despite of growth and prominence of emails as a marketing channel, the unsubscribe rate is very high. The first reason people unsubscribe is that they receive too many! And the second reason people unsubscribe is that its not relevant.

Hope you enjoyed reading this! Do share the link with your colleagues and friends.