The history of email

Email is older than the internet itself. It started as a way to leave notes on a shared university computer in 1965, and today about 4.6 billion people use it. Here is the whole story, and every major email service along the way.

Updated October 17, 2026 · 10 min read

Timeline at a glance

Before the internet: email on one computer (1965)

In the early 1960s, a single big computer was shared by many people through terminals. In 1965, MIT's Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) gained a MAIL command, written by Tom Van Vleck and Noel Morris, that let one user leave a message in another user's mailbox file. It only worked between people on the same machine, but it was email in every way that mattered.

1971: the first networked email and the @ sign

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, an engineer at the company BBN, which helped build ARPANET (the network that became the internet), combined a local messaging program with a file-transfer program. The result sent a message from one computer to another sitting right next to it, across the network.

The first message was a test he later said was forgettable, "something like QWERTYUIOP." To show which computer a person was on, he chose the @ sign: it already meant "at," and it never appeared in people's names. The format name@computer is the one we still use.

The 1970s: the Queen, and the first spam

Email quickly became the most popular use of ARPANET. On March 26, 1976, Queen Elizabeth II sent an email from a British defense research center, the first head of state to do so.

On May 3, 1978, Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corporation, sent an invitation to a product show to 393 ARPANET users at once. People complained, but DEC later credited it with millions in sales. It is remembered as the first spam. The word itself came later, from a Monty Python sketch in which "spam" drowns out everything else.

The 1980s: the rules email still runs on

• 1982: SMTP, the protocol servers use to pass mail along, and the standard email format with To, From and Subject were published as RFC 821 and RFC 822. The same year, Scott Fahlman proposed the :-) smiley on a Carnegie Mellon message board.
• Online services brought email to paying customers: CompuServe offered business email from 1978, MCI Mail launched in September 1983, and Prodigy (nationwide from 1990) famously charged 25 cents for each message beyond 30 a month in 1991, later dropping the fee.
• Office email arrived: cc:Mail and Microsoft Mail (1988) connected workers on company networks. At its peak in 1997, cc:Mail had about 14 million users.
• 1984: POP let people download mail to their own computers.
• 1986: Mark Crispin designed IMAP, which keeps mail on the server so every device sees the same inbox. Your phone almost certainly uses it today.
• 1989: MCI Mail and CompuServe connected to the internet, so their customers could email anyone. It marked the start of commercial internet email.
• 1988–1990: Email programs arrived for ordinary computers: Eudora (1988, named after writer Eudora Welty's story "Why I Live at the P.O."), Lotus Notes (1989) for big companies, and Pegasus Mail (1990), which is still updated today.

The 1990s: email for everyone

In 1992, MIME let emails carry attachments, pictures and languages beyond plain English. Then the web arrived, and email moved into the browser.

• AOL connected its members to internet email in 1993, and by 1997 was reported to be the largest email provider in the world. Its "You've got mail" greeting was recorded by Elwood Edwards in 1989, for a fee of $200.
• Hotmail launched on July 4, 1996, founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith. It was free and worked from any web browser. Microsoft bought it in December 1997 for about $400 million.
• Yahoo Mail launched in October 1997, built on RocketMail, after Yahoo bought its maker, Four11.
• Juno (1996) offered free email even to people without internet access, using dial-up. Mail.com (1995) offered vanity addresses like @lawyer.com.
• In the US, internet providers gave every customer a mailbox: EarthLink (founded 1994), AOL, and later the cable and phone companies. Netscape built email into its Communicator browser suite in 1997.
• Around the world: GMX in Germany (1997), with Web.de adding free email in 1998; Rediff.com in India (1997, home of Rediffmail); NetEase in China (1997, credited with China's first free email service, today 163.com and 126.com); Daum Hanmail in South Korea (1997), followed by Naver (1999); Mail.ru in Russia (1998); Libero in Italy (1999); and Yahoo Japan Mail (1999).
• At work, Microsoft's Exchange (1996) and Outlook (1997) became the standard office email setup.
• In 1999, Fastmail and Hushmail launched, and the first BlackBerry put email in people's pockets.

The 2000s: Gmail and the storage race

Early free accounts held only a few megabytes, so people deleted email constantly. On April 1, 2004, Google launched Gmail with 1 GB of free storage, hundreds of times more than rivals. Because of the date, many people thought it was an April Fool's joke. It started by invitation only, and the "beta" label stayed on until 2009. Rivals raced to match it, and search replaced folders as the way people found old mail.

The same decade brought Yandex Mail (2000), Apple's free email (iTools in 2000, later .Mac, MobileMe and iCloud), QQ Mail from Tencent in China (2002), Thunderbird 1.0 from Mozilla (2004), privacy service Lavabit (2004) and, from India, Zoho Mail (2008). In the US, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 set the first national rules for marketing email.

The 2010s: privacy and smartphones

• Hotmail became Outlook.com in 2012–2013, with existing Hotmail addresses kept working.
• iCloud Mail (2011) replaced MobileMe for Apple users.
• Lavabit shut down in August 2013 rather than hand over the encryption keys that would have exposed Edward Snowden's email. It relaunched in 2017.
• Privacy-first providers grew: Tutanota (2011, now Tuta) in Germany and Proton Mail (2014) in Switzerland, which reported 100 million users by 2024.
• New apps rethought the inbox: Google's Inbox (2014–2019) introduced Smart Reply, and Spark (2015) and BlueMail brought many accounts into one app on phones.
• DMARC (published as RFC 7489 in 2015) gave domains a way to stop others sending email in their name.

The 2020s: email today

Email is bigger than ever: about 4.6 billion users sending roughly 376 billion emails a day, according to the Radicati Group's forecasts for 2025. Gmail alone has about 1.8 billion users.

The biggest recent change is authentication. Since February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo require bulk senders to prove their mail is genuine with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and Microsoft added similar rules for Outlook.com in 2025. Check any domain with the free DMARC and SPF checker, and see the email deliverability checklist.

Paid inboxes such as HEY (2020) and Superhuman show people will pay for a calmer inbox, and AI now drafts replies and summarizes long threads inside Gmail and Outlook.

Every major email service, at a glance

Choosing one today? See the best free email services and business email hosting compared.

Email services around the world

Gone but not forgotten

• RocketMail became Yahoo Mail in 1997, and MailCity became Lycos Mail.
• Portal-era email from Excite, AltaVista, Netscape, Angelfire and Tripod faded as Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail took over.
• NetZero and Juno offered free dial-up internet with email, and merged in 2001.
• Outblaze in Hong Kong ran the email behind many portals before selling that business to IBM in 2009.
• CompuServe, MCI Mail and the original Prodigy closed as webmail took over.
• Skiff, a privacy-focused email service, was bought by Notion in February 2024 and shut down later that year.

Email apps that shaped how we read mail

For the newsletter and marketing side of the story, see the history of email marketing.

For today's best picks, see the best email app for iPhone and the best email client for Linux.

Who invented email? The debate

Most historians credit email to a series of people: the MIT CTSS team in 1965 for messages on one computer, and Ray Tomlinson in 1971 for sending mail between computers on a network.

V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai says he invented email as a teenager in New Jersey, writing a program he called EMAIL for a medical school around 1978 and registering a copyright on that code in 1982. Historians dispute the claim, because networked email, including To, From and CC fields, was already in use in the early 1970s. A federal judge later noted that whether the claim is true depends on how you define "email." Both views are part of the record; the 1971 date is the one most widely accepted.

Fun facts

• Tomlinson could not remember exactly what his first email said, only that it was a test, probably the top row of the keyboard.
• Eudora was named after writer Eudora Welty, author of "Why I Live at the P.O."
• AOL's "You've got mail" voice was recorded at home on a cassette recorder.
• In February 2025, Yahoo ran a Super Bowl ad that showed actor Bill Murray's real Yahoo address, and he got almost 150,000 emails in two hours.
• Gmail's launch on April Fool's Day 2004 made many people think 1 GB of free storage was a joke.

Questions people ask

Who invented email?

Ray Tomlinson is generally credited with inventing networked email in 1971. Messaging between users of one computer existed earlier, at MIT in 1965.

When was the first email sent?

The first email between two computers on a network was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson over ARPANET.

Why does email use the @ sign?

Ray Tomlinson chose @ in 1971 because it meant "at" and did not appear in people's names, so name@computer was clear.

What was the first free webmail service?

Hotmail, launched on July 4, 1996, is widely seen as the first popular free webmail service, because it worked from any web browser.

When did Gmail start?

Gmail launched on April 1, 2004, by invitation, with 1 GB of free storage.

How many people use email?

About 4.6 billion people in 2025, sending roughly 376 billion emails a day, according to Radicati Group forecasts.

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