Ray Tomlinson, the man who literally put the @ in email addresses, has died. Here’s a brief history of electronic messages, from the Queen’s first mail to the triumph of spam

How did email grow from messages between academics to a global epidemic?

Ray Tomlinson, the man who literally put the “@” in email, died on Saturday, but his invention, which allowed electronic messages to spread across the internet and fill our lives and our inboxes on a daily basis, will live on.

Here is a brief look at what Tomlinson started and the evolution of email through the last half-century.

The first electronic message - 1965

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Computers were all about spools of paper and tape back when the first email was sent in the 1960s. Photograph: H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Corbis

The very first version of what would become known as email was invented in 1965 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as part of the university’s Compatible Time-Sharing System, which allowed users to share files and messages on a central disk, logging in from remote terminals.

Tomlinson and the @ - 1971

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The man who quite literally put the @ sign at the heart of email. Photograph: Handout

American computer programmer Tomlinson arguably conceived the method of sending email between different computers across the forerunner to the internet, Arpanet, at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), introducing the “@” sign to allow messages to be targeted at certain users on certain machines.

Emails become a standard - 1973

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Before they were commissioning robots for the battlefield, Darpa started with the internet and email. Photograph: HO/AFP/Getty Images

The first email standard was proposed in 1973 at Darpa and finalised within Arpanet in 1977, including common things such as the to and from fields, and the ability to forward emails to others who were not initially a recipient.

The Queen sends her first email - 1976

Facebook Twitter Pinterest If the Queen had known what email would do to the popularity of her beloved stamps, would she have pressed send? Photograph: Martin Keene/PA

Queen Elizabeth II sends an email on Arpanet, becoming the first head of state to do so.



Eric Schmidt designs BerkNet - 1978

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Before Google, Schmidt developed one of the first intranet systems and messaging over serial connections in the world as part of his degree. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Eric Schmidt, who would later lead Google and oversee the introduction of Gmail, wrote Berkley Network as part of his master’s thesis in 1978, which was an early intranet service offering messaging over serial connections.

EMAIL program developed - 1979

At the age of 14, Shiva Ayyadurai writes a program called EMAIL for the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, which sent electronic messages within the university, later copyrighting the term in 1982. Whether or not this is the first use of the word email is up for debate.

Microsoft Mail arrives - 1988

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Calm down guys, I’m sure this email thing won’t catch on. Photograph: Lou Dematteis/Reuters

The first version of Microsoft Mail was released in 1988 for Mac OS, allowing users of Apple’s AppleTalk Networks to send messages to each other. In 1991, a second version was released for other platforms including DOS and Windows, which laid the groundwork for Microsoft’s later Outlook and Exchange email systems.



CompuServe starts internet-based email service - 1989

Facebook Twitter Pinterest CompuServe became one of the first ISPs to offer email to their customers before it was taken over by AOL. Photograph: Neal Lauron/Reuters

CompuServe became the first online service to offer internet connectivity via dial-up phone connections, and its proprietary email service allowed other internet users to send emails to each other.



Lotus Notes launched - 1989

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lotus Notes brought joy of email to millions more workers, although it didn’t look quite like this in 1989. Photograph: Roger Tooth/The Guardian

The first version Lotus Notes was released in 1989 by Lotus Development Corporation, which was bought by IBM in 1995.

The start of spam - 1990

Facebook Twitter Pinterest What’s the problem with spam? Photograph: Alamy

The rise of spam can be charted back to the very early days of Arpanet, but it wasn’t until the early 1990s that it hit users across the internet, when it was aimed at message boards and later email addresses.

April 1994 is the first recorded business practice of spam from two lawyers from Phoenix, Laurence Carter and Martha Siegel, who ended up writing a book on it.

The attachment - 1992

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The attachment was born in 1992, another vector for computer viruses such as the Sobig F to spread Photograph: Roger Tooth/The Guardian

The attachment was born when the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (Mime) protocol was released, which includes the ability to attach things that are not just text to emails. And so begins the painful exercise of trying to delete emails to make space after someone sends you a massive attachment in the days of limited inbox space.

Outlook and Aol - 1993

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The iconic AOL CD that cluttered homes for years. Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian

The first version of Microsoft’s Outlook was released in 1993 as part of Exchange Server 5.5, while at the same time US internet service providers AOL and Delphi connected their email systems, paving the way for modern, overloaded email systems we struggle with today.

Hotmail launches - 1996

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Microsoft’s Hotmail was one of the first popular, ISP-agnostic web-based email services. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

Before Microsoft bought it for $400m, 1996 saw the launch of one of the first popular webmail email services called HoTMaiL developed by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith. It was one of the first email services not tied to a particular ISP and adopted new HTML-based email formatting – hence the stylising of the brand name.

It was bought by Microsoft in 1997, rebranded MSN Hotmail, then Windows Live Hotmail and replaced by Outlook.com in 2013.

Yahoo Mail follows - 1997

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yahoo Mail has been through several revamps in its 9-year history. Photograph: Yahoo

Yahoo Mail was launched the year after Hotmail, which was gaining users by the thousands, and was based on internet company Four11’s Rocketmail, which was bought as part of Yahoo’s acquisition of the company.

You’ve Got Mail, and so has everyone else - 1998

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Still from the romantic comedy film You’ve Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Photograph: Warner Bros

Email was cemented in the public consciousness with the notorious “you’ve got mail” sound of email arriving for AOL users, which formed the cornerstone of the 1998 Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan romantic comedy, You’ve Got Mail.

By the late 1990s spam was becoming a real problem – inducted to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1998 – as more and more marketers jumped on the practically zero-cost outreach proposition and inundated our inboxes.

In 2002, the European Union released its Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, which included a section on spam that made it illegal to send unsolicited communications for direct marketing purposes without prior consent of the recipient.

The US passed similar laws in 2004, although neither have been particularly effective at reducing the load.

Gmail launches - 2004

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gmail, or Googlemail as it was once known in the olden days. Photograph: Dean Murray / Rex Features

Google’s popular email service, Gmail, started life as an internal mail system for Google employees, developed by Paul Buchheit in 2001. It wasn’t unveiled to the public until a limited, invite-only beta release in 2004. It was made publicly available in 2007 and dropped its “beta” status in 2009.

Fighting back against spam - 2005

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email protocols started fighting back against spam in the early 2000s. Photograph: Ian Waldie/Getty Images

The first email standard to attempt to fight the deluge of spam by verifying senders was published after a five-year development. Sender Policy Framework was then implemented by a variety of anti-spam programs. A standard of authentication to attempt to prevent email spoofing and phishing was also released called DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).

Email goes mobile for casual users - 2007

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Little did Steve Jobs know that the Mail icon on the iPhone would forever show thousands unread. Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP

Apple’s first iPhone was released in 2007, which began to introduce mobile email to the consumer masses. Until that point pre-capacitive consumer smartphones typically had limited email support, while RIM’s BlackBerry had brought the burden of work email to employee palms starting in 2003.

Buried in email - 2015

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Buried in email. Photograph: LifeStyleKB / Alamy/Alamy

From humble internal communications beginnings, email now dominates a vast proportion of everyday life. An estimated 4.4bn email addresses are in use worldwide with 205bn emails sent per day in 2015, according to data from market research firm Radicati Group.

That number is set to increase to over 246bn emails a day by the end of 2019.