A love-hate letter to email on its 50th anniversary (Part 1)
This is the first article in a two-part series in honor of the 50th anniversary of email.
Half a century ago, an MIT graduate named Ray Tomlinson became the first person to transmit a message from one computer to another, although it would be years before anyone referred to this practice as email.
Tomlinson worked for an engineering firm called Bolt Beranek and Newman (now Raytheon BBN), which had been contracted by the US Defence Department to help build the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), itself a precursor to the internet as we know it today.
At the time, computers were isolated from one another and also extremely expensive, so each was used by tens of different people and notes for fellow users were dropped into numbered mailboxes.
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With the arrival of ARPANET, which connected roughly 20 machines (used by more than 1,000 different people), the ability to send memos to and fro between computers became invaluable.
At some point in 1971 (the precise date has been lost to history), Tomlinson glued together the existing ARPANET SENDMSG utility and a file-transfer program he had been working on. Using his creation, he fired a message into an inbox on another machine on the network, separating the user identifier and destination address with the @ symbol.
In the period since the first email was delivered, countless different technologies have been invented, adopted and superseded. Although email has been declared bound for the grave many times over, it’s currently used by billions of people worldwide and remains the primary mode of business communication.
According to data from Statista, roughly 306 billion emails were sent and received each day in 2020, which equates to more than 110 trillion across the course of the year. Projections suggest this figure is set to rise to 375 billion per day by 2025.
However, the continued popularity of email doesn’t mean the venerable technology hasn’t evolved in the 50 years since Tomlinson changed the face of communication.
A process of evolution
Although the death of email never materialized, the technology has been through a process of multiple rebirths, forced to adapt as the landscape changed shape around it. It’s just that these changes aren’t immediately apparent, because all of the work happens under the hood.
“While it hasn’t been replaced, the technology underpinning email has evolved over the time. Just as video technology has evolved from VHS, to DVD, to streaming, email has evolved as well,” a spokesperson from email service ProtonMail told TechRadar Pro.
The ability to attach files to emails, for example, didn’t exist until the arrival of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) protocol in 1992, which created a whole new use case for the service.
The arrival of smartphones also necessitated an overhaul to the way email products were built, and the same can be said of the proliferation of malware and phishing scams, which has played an influential role in the development of email protocols.
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), used for sending emails to mail servers, was first created in 1981, but has since been updated and extended multiple times to allow for the introduction of authentication, encryption and other upgrades.
Both the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Post Office Protocol (POP), open standards for retrieving emails from mail servers, have cycled through a number of different iterations designed to improve speed and security.
According to ProtonMail, this process of repeated reinforcement will continue on in years to come, driven by greater public awareness of issues related to security and data privacy.
“At the moment, the biggest providers leave their users’ personal data unprotected and available for collection and monetization,” said the firm. “Public opinion is shifting away from surveillance capitalism and it’s only a matter of time before all consumers demand greater control over who can access their data.”
Beyond the underlying technology, however, the way email is used has also changed considerably. Over time, email has become a business-first mode of communication, rather than a service used to correspond with friends and family.
Available to anyone for free, email has also become a universal passport for the internet, permitting access to web-based services and providing the basis for online transactions.
“A crucial thing to remember about email is its openness and that it can be used by and large for free,” said Len Shneyder, who heads up industry relations for email API platform Twilio SendGrid.
“Email was built as an open platform with few barriers to entry, it doesn’t require an app to be downloaded, it is a core function of smart devices, PCs, tablets, laptops and the most basic way of creating an account on other platforms.”
Without email, in other words, there could be no e-commerce, no social media and no web-based services. This development has placed email at the heart of internet activity, from which position it will be extremely difficult to dislodge.
A changing of the guard
Since the commercialization of email, the market has undergone a complete changing of the guard. A process of consolidation has seen a wide range of email providers reduced to just a handful.
The first commercial email service was MCI Mail, launched in 1983. The 1990s brought a slew of memorable names, such as AOL Mail, Hotmail (now Outlook), Lycos, Mail.com and Yahoo! Mail, which were joined by Gmail in 2004.
However, a process of selection and acquisition has whittled down this pool of providers, so that just a select few companies have come to dominate the market.
Data from Litmus Email Analytics suggests Apple, Google and Microsoft are responsible for eight of the world’s top ten most popular email clients, controlling 89% of the market. When it comes to email hosting, Google and Microsoft rule the roost, although up-to-date statistics are not readily available.
The slimming of the market can be attributed in-part to difficulties in monetizing email, which is both free to use and expensive to run. The companies that thrive in the email market today use their services to hook users into a wider ecosystem of products and to collect valuable data that can be applied elsewhere.
“At base, email is a universal agreement between people about how messages can be exchanged,” explained Rogen Kay, VP Security Strategy at email client INKY.
“As a lingua franca, email can be exchanged among phone and computer users, Mac, Windows and Android users, on any browser or email client. This kind of inertial is hard to move.”
But the same forces that have created a market prone to monopolization have also guaranteed the technology’s continued relevance, says Jan Oetjen, CEO at email service GMX. By establishing itself as “the backbone of the internet”, email has given proprietary challengers a steep (and perhaps insurmountable) hill to climb.
“What makes email so relevant is the openness of its standard,” he told us. “It eludes the attempts of tech giants to create their own proprietary platforms that only their customers can communicate on. You can be sure that your email will reach its recipient independent of what email service provider they use.”
And despite the dominance of just a few large companies, Oetjen is bullish about the opportunity for smaller providers, especially as public opinion begins to swing in opposition to surveillance capitalism.
“Due to the network effects, we have a market structure that has a negative impact on the intensity of competition. Google in particular uses its dominance in Android operating systems to tie users to Gmail,” he said.
“However, big US companies have lost a lot of trust in recent years. This is a starting point for smaller providers to position themselves as a more secure and trustworthy alternative.”
The second part of this two-part series will be published on March 21 at 13:30GMT here.
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