Lesson 2, the beginning of Commercial email

Lesson 2, the beginning of Commercial email

Now we start to discover the initial beginnings of commercial email. Please note that there are many ISPs not mentioned here, however i shall endeavor to cover them in my blog postings along the line, the major players are mentioned as key points of reference. I found a really cool infographic regarding the history of commercial email.

In 1988 Steve Dorner developed Eudora the first commercial product to be widely used for reading and sending email on local area networks (LANs)

A year later in 1989 Compuserve and MCI mail become first formally sanctioned email carriers connected to the internet (1989)

1991, Ray Ozzie and Mitch Kapor released a major version of Lotus Notes (2.0)

1992, Microsoft releases Microsoft Outlook their answer to Lotus Notes.

In 1993, AOL brought out an ISP, which was accessible internet based email system by this time there were 7 million users.

In 1995 Echomail was launched, the first integrated Email Management system to help businesses handle increasing volumes of inbound Email. AT&T being their first customers.

This is where it gets more familiar in terms of what we know the commercial email space as today, in 1996 hotmail was launched with 25 million users now with user accounts.

Fast forward one year and there was the emergence of Yahoo.com this was offered as an alternative to Hotmail, email can too be accessed via a browser.

During the next years email technical significantly progressed, of which i”ll be covering in the next lessons. Along came Gmail launches on April fools day 2004 with now over 1 billion email accounts world wide, in 2012/13 gmail becomes the most used email service provider.

In 2013 now with a sheer 4 billion email accounts world wide, the question is still sometimes thrown around is email dead? i certainly don’t think so..

This takes us into our next lesson: Lesson 3, Security threats and Cyber attacks.