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Email Day is born in honor of its creator, Ray Tomlinson

It has been more than 50 years since the first e-mail message was sent, and from then until now this service, e-mail, has grown exponentially to become the most important and widely used means of communication throughout the world of all what the internet offers. There are now billions of email accounts created, and hundreds of billions of emails are sent around the world every day.

The first was sent from computer to computer through ARPANET, the US Department of Defense network on October 29, 1969, but email, in its current format, did not arrive until 1971, when Ray Tomlinson designed and developed email as we know it. currently, with the at sign to indicate email addresses.

However, the concept of electronic mail is somewhat earlier, and the first example of mail in digital format has been found in the MIT computers. It dates from 1965, and was found in a program called Mailbox, that is, mailbox. Users of MIT computers could, with it, leave messages for other users, who could see them when they connected to the same computer on which they had been generated. Of course, they could not be sent from one computer to another, which came with the ARPANET. And soon it spread like a stain. Practically as soon as Tomlinson chose the symbol of the at sign to indicate the origin and destination of a message.

By 1976, email accounted for as much as three-quarters of all ARPANET traffic. It was so effective that there were already those who were considering how to send a message to a computer that was outside an internal network, which were the ones that were working at the time in various institutions. And precisely this concern was the basis of what we know today as the Internet: the need to send messages between different organizations, with different networks. Also, at the same time, the need arose to develop software capable of storing and organizing messages, and the first precursors of the current email mailbox were born.

In 1980, the Internet was taking its first steps, and the first email hosting services began to appear. As early as 1993, the term email was well known throughout the world, and both its use and that of the Internet were beginning to spread, thanks to services such as America Online, Hotmail, and Yahoo. For many Internet users, email became the service they used the most, and it is still one of the main ones today.

By 1999 there were 400 million email users worldwide, and growing. At the turn of the century, having an email address, or even several, was as common as having a phone number. Today there are over 4 billion email accounts worldwide, and counting.

But it was not until this year that it was proposed that the email daythat the company ZeroBounce has established the April 23rdthe Ray Tomlinson’s birthday, in 1941. The company has raised this day as a tribute to Tomlinson, who passed away on March 5, 2016, as well as to raise awareness of the use of best practices when using email, in addition to highlighting its advantages, but also the dangers it poses, and facing for which we have to be prepared.

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