1965 – Email is introduced at MIT.
1971 – Raymond Tomlinson allegedly sent “QWERTYUIOP” as the first email message ever sent.
1977 – A standard format (RFC 733) is proposed to enable sending email across the internet.
1977 – U.S. Postal Service foresees email as a potential threat to mail volumes.
1981 – The American Standard Code for Information Interchange adopted a process of letters, punctuation and symbols to digitally store information.
1982 – First use of the word “email.”
1985 – Most users of email are Government and military employees, students and academic professionals.
1988 – The first commercial email product, Microsoft Mail is released for the Mac.
1989 – CompuServe offers Internet connectivity and email to its subscribers.
1989 – IBM releases Lotus Notes 1.0.
1991 – Email spam begins.
1993 – BellSouth and IBM unveil Simon Personal Communicator, the world’s first mobile phone with PDA features, including email capability.
1993 – AOL and Delphi connect their proprietary email systems to the Internet.
1992 – Microsoft Outlook for MS-DOS is released.
1996 – Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launch “HoTMail,” one of the first free Web-based email services.
1997 – Microsoft Outlook 97 is released, offering a central hub that includes email, scheduling, contact management, task management and a journal module.
1997 – Yahoo! introduces Yahoo! Mail.
1997 – Microsoft purchases Hotmail for approximately $400 million.
1998 – “You’ve Got Mail” premiers at the box office.
1998 – HTML and rich text formatting is introduced to email messages.
2000 – Microsoft launches Outlook 2000 which includes the ability to incorporate personal, corporate and Web-based information in one place.
2000 – Microsoft introduces Entourage mail for Mac.
2000 – First public mention of the idea to create mail sender DNS records, later to become known as SPF.
2003 – The BlackBerry smartphone is introduced to the public.
2004 – The Federal Trade Commission passes email spam laws.
2011 – Associated Press Stylebook changes “e-mail” to email.
2012 – In the United States, 90 million Americans access email through a mobile device, with 64% of them doing it on a daily basis.
2013 – There are more than 3 billion email accounts across the globe, and approximately 294 billion emails are sent per day.
2013 – The first domains start to adopt a DMARC policy.
2014 – In April 2014, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published SPF (Sender Policy Framework) in RFC 7208 as a proposed standard.
2015 – Groupon became the company that sends the most email. Groupon sent 388 emails on average per user. (Source: unroll.me)
2015 – Microsoft launches Office 365 email and it quickly becomes Microsofts most profitable product.
2016 – During the 2016 US elections, Hillary Clinton makes headlines for using a “private email server.”
2017 – Aproximatley half of the world population uses email as the global number of daily email users hits 3.7 billion.
2018 – 76% of businesses reported being a victim of a phishing attack
2019 – 80 percent of business email domains continue to lack DMARC protection
2019 – Phishing accounts for 90% of data breaches
Sources: Microsoft, Mashable, Macworld, AP Stylebook, Wikipedia.
