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Fernando Corbato from MIT developed an ingenious way of communicating between colleagues using text messages.
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Ray Tomlinson, developed a system for sending messages between computers that used the “@”symbol to identify addresses. He sent the first electronic mail message.
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Larry Roberts developed the first e-mail management program that develops the ability to list, select, forward, and respond to messages.
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The first electronically-sent advertisement goes out, over a network of government and university computers.
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The word “email” is first used. The first ever smiley “emoticon” is invented by Scott Fahlman.
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Steve Dorner invents Eudora, an application that gave a popular face to e-mail by providing a graphical user interface for e-mail management.
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The first release of Lotus Notes email software. 35,000 copies are sold in the first year.
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A few companies – including the Hotmail – begin to offer free, user-anywhere, internet mail.
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Microsoft Outlook is released. Microsoft buys Hotmail for about $400 million. About 10 million users worldwide have free web mail accounts.
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The word “spam” is added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
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E-mail celebrates its 30th anniversary with virtually every business in the developed world signed on. Reach Mail is created and marketers rejoice. Email deliverability has never been so easy.
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George W. Bush signs into law the CAN-SPAM ACT, the US first national standards for sending commercial e-mails.
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FTC codifies e-mail spam laws. Multimedia emails are introduced after the MMS World Congress in Vienna.
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SPF, the first technology that verifies email senders’ identities, is established.
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Google makes Gmail available to the public worldwide. Anti-phishing security protocol DKIM is adopted by the Internet Engineering Task Force.
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The Associated Press Stylebook changes “e-mail” to “email”.
