I just found out that email is 40 years old! That's a staggering number for me. As a marketer, I love emails, even though people have been composing requiems for it for quite sometime now. Thankfully, some people in the same industry are not so sure as the infographic below would reveal:
I know which side I am on. Here are some interesting facts that I found on the internet about emails which I wanted to share with you:
- 1971 - The first email was sent out on this month 40 years ago. It was sent by Ray Tomlinson who strangely doesn't remember what the message really was!
- 1978 - Gary Thuerk, a marketer for Digital Equipment Corporation, started one of the most hateful acts in the history of mankind by sending out the first spam to 500 addresses.
- 1982 - The word 'email' was used for the first time. No, I don't know what they used to call it earlier either.
- 1997 - Microsoft acquired Hotmail for $400. Like most of their major products, its doing well even today.
- 1998 - With some regret, the word spam was added to the Oxford dictionary.
- 2003 - CAN-SPAM Act gets translated as the "You-Can-Spam" act for a lot of spam opposers.
- 2007 - Gmail went public. I never looked back after that.
- 2009 - Gmail suffered an outage. Thankfully Cloud computing carried on unscathed.
- 2011 - Hotmail starts attacking 'graymails' - unwanted emails received legitimately
One thing I am quite clear about now is that email is here to stay for some more time. So, the question is, what's coming up next?
11th Nov Update: Econsultancy comes to the defense of email yet again. Apparently, it has grown by as much as 200% year on year!
11th Nov Update: Econsultancy comes to the defense of email yet again. Apparently, it has grown by as much as 200% year on year!
