History
Email is older than the web. Here are nine frames of how it changed.
It began as a way for two programmers to leave each other a note on a shared machine. Then everything happened.
Nobody planned email. It grew out of machines that needed to leave each other messages, and the rest of the story is a series of accidents that stuck. Here it is as a storyboard.
Why the @ sign is the surprise
- In 1971 Ray Tomlinson needed a way to say which machine a user was on. He picked the @ sign, a symbol nobody used in names.
- That one choice is still the only thing every mail address on Earth has in common.
- Nine frames below. Each one is the moment the system changed shape.
What stuck, and what got bolted on
- SMTP (1982) set the rules for servers to hand mail to each other. It was written for a small trusted network, so it trusted everyone.
- Free web mail (1996) put an inbox in a browser. Anyone could have an address in a minute.
- Spam law (2003) and Gmail (2004) changed the stakes: spam became a crime in some countries and a storage problem in the rest.
- DKIM (2011) and DMARC (2015) added signatures and policy, because the 1982 trust model had stopped working.
- Bulk sender rules (2024) made authentication and one-click unsubscribe a requirement for large senders.
- Today most apps don't speak SMTP at all. They call an HTTPS API, and the mail goes out through someone else's relay.