The First Email

The very first electronic mail or e-mail was sent in 1972. It was Ray Tomlinson, a computer graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who sent the first e-mail. It was also Tomlinson’s idea to use the @ sign to separate the name of the user from the address from which the mail was being sent. A study conducted by the Radicati Group in October 2007, puts the number of email users worldwide at 1.2 billion. That means that a little over one in every six persons on earth use email.

The study also found that the number of emails sent per day (in 2006) was around 183 billion. This means that more than two million emails are sent every second. And about 70 to 72 per cent (or between 128 and 132 billion) of them might be spam and viruses. Here are some other interesting facts: the average business user receiver around 25 emails a day and spends 2.6 hours a day reading and responding to his or her mail. It takes some 77 minutes a week for an employee to manage his or her mailbox doing things like cleaning out old messages and filing old messages or attachments.

And if you think that you can find stuff on your mail easily, you could be wrong. Research says that it takes 8.2 minutes for a user to find an email that is older than two weeks. Did you know that if you work from a company or you have an Internet Service Provider (ISP), your emails do not go directly to recipient mailboxes. They are stored on the ISP’s mail servers before it tries to deliver them. So, it is worthwhile putting in some kind of email security system in place. Here are a few other interesting facts: the typical user stores more than one-half of his/her critical business information within the confines of the email system and if you were working with a company in either the US or the UK, you would be horrified to learn that 38 per cent of US and UK companies monitor and read mails written by their employees.