the.com/email
the cockroach of communication: outlived every app sent to kill it
means A message sent electronically from one person to another across a computer network, or the system that carries such messages.
from A clipped compound of 'electronic mail,' with 'mail' tracing back through Old French 'male,' a traveling bag or pouch — the leather sack a courier slung over his shoulder. So the word still carries, faintly, the shape of a satchel: centuries of letters bundled into a bag, now bundled into bytes. The term emerged with the rise of networked computing in the 1970s, and the hyphen quietly fell away as the thing became ordinary.
- first message
- sent in 1971, a forgotten test string
- the @ sign
- chosen because it was idle on the keyboard
- daily volume
- over 300 billion sent every single day
- spam origin
- named after a Monty Python sketch
- read receipts
- most people quietly ignore them on purpose
gmail — google's email service launched in 2004, now with over 1.8 billion users worldwide
outlook — microsoft's email platform with over 400 million users globally
yahoo mail — founded in 1997, one of the oldest web-based email services still active