Presentation on the topic: Chronology of the development of email. Interesting facts from the history and practice of e-mail marketing

Recently, the use of e-mail and e-mail newsletters has become one of the most important tools in the field of advertising. Today, e-mail marketing is used by almost all dynamically developing companies. To promote products on the market, to attract new and retain old customers, they actively use the most powerful source of information and communication today - Internet mail services.

But few marketers and managers of these companies know that email and e-mail marketing, despite their relatively young age, have a rich history filled with interesting facts. In addition, some statistics on the use of mailing lists are simply amazing in their scale.

Pioneers

Here are some facts about early users and early emails:

1. The first email message was sent by Ray Tomlinson in 1972. It is interesting that the author does not even remember the exact contents of his letter. According to him, it was a set of characters like “Test 123” or “QWERTYUIOP”.
2. The first world leader and head of state to use email was Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain. In 1976, she sent her first email.
3. The first e-mail message from space to Earth was sent in 1991 by the crew of the STS-46 Atlantis shuttle. The astronauts used Apple software to send the email. Literally its content was: “Hello, Earth! The crew of STS-43 welcomes you. This is the first AppleLink from space. It's cool here, it's a pity you're not around... We're sending cryo and RCS! Hasta la vista, baby... We'll be back."
4. Spam mailing dates back to 1978. This year, on May 3, the first advertising message was sent to 600 email addresses of American users. So the author of the message, Gary Tuerk, wanted to advertise the computers he was working on.

About the "@" symbol

Facts about the familiar “@” symbol are also interesting.

1. The “@” sign was first used by the same Ray Tomlinson. With it, he separated the username from the name of the PC on the network.
2. “@” is called differently in different countries of the world. If in Russia it is a “dog”, then in Denmark it is a “monkey’s tail”, in Italy it is a “little snail”, in Sweden it is “The letter “A” with an elephant’s trunk”. This sign is called the “mouse tail”, and the “sleeping cat”, and even the “worm”.
3. Since 2004, “@” has its own encoding in Morse code and is designated in it as “dot - dash - dash - dot - dash - dot.”

About spam

Today, at least 90% of all letters sent by e-mail are considered SPAM. It's interesting that:

1. The name "SPAM" for advertising mailings was borrowed from the name of the stew. At one time, American consumers were pretty tired of canned meat “SPAM” and its advertising, so the word itself was perfectly suited for the name of letters arriving in mailboxes.
2. The word "SPAM" has been included in the famous Oxford English Dictionary since 1998.
3. Today, the majority of SPAM servers (64%) are located in Taiwan.
4. The effectiveness of SPAM is estimated in our time as 1 response for every 12 million emails sent.

A little about everything

1. About 247 billion emails are sent every day. Interestingly, 60% of them have errors or typos.
2. 38% of Western companies monitor every letter sent by employees from work email.
3. In the time it took you to read this sentence, approximately 20 million emails were sent worldwide!

In this article I would like to talk about painful issues regarding my own email, but I cannot deviate from the format of the article, so before I talk about painful issues, I’ll tell you about the history of the emergence of such a concept as email. Paper letters, as well as faxes, lost their popularity after the advent of email in the early 90s. The popularity of this service is still great today - despite the transition of many people to personal correspondence. Information about how this area developed and what has changed over the years:

First official email

Not everyone knows that Ray Tomlinson was the first person to send a real email. He was involved in the implementation of various ideas of the ARPANET Institute in Massachusetts, but among his tasks there was no item on the introduction of electronic correspondence. He decided to try to implement such an idea, based on his own considerations. Ray believed that this was a promising direction, and the idea itself was very creative.

Electronic communications began their development precisely at the moment when letters were transmitted between computers - this was the first e-mail. The innovator himself was still able to remember what exactly he wrote - but is inclined to think that it was not a coherent speech, but rather “QWERTYUIOP”.

The appearance of spam

According to the most common versions, the name itself appeared after the Monty Python show. There, a choir of dressed-up Vikings sang odes to canned food from Hormel Foods - well, they were called "SPAM".

Today “spam” is unwanted mail, various advertisements; a little earlier this word was used to describe offensive behavior on the Internet. This value comes from chats in various multiplayer games.

Most popular password

You will be surprised - but “123456” is the leader in this category; most Internet users do not mistrust such a “complex” password.

"Easter egg" in the Spam folder

Google has prepared a kind of Easter egg for some accounts. You can find it by going to Spam. This is a very funny and useful joke - an advertisement for canned pork and a link to a huge number of recipes, guess what the canned food is called? That's right - SPAM.

Where did @ come from?

@ was first shown in the early 15th century. Spanish merchants used this sign to measure goods. The measure was used when buying livestock or wine, it is a kind of shortening of "arroba", the full name of this measure.

Further, this sign was used as a price tag, as well as notes for accountants’ reports. Only after such a long journey did this sign appear on our keyboards. Remember Ray Tomlinson? Well, it was he who turned his attention to such a strange sign.

Correct email name

Everything here is quite simple - depending on who you ask, the answers may vary greatly. Some resources insist that "email" is the correct abbreviation, while others insist on using the hyphen "e-mail".

Name of the "@" symbol

Everything here is not as simple as you thought, “commercial at” and “doggy” are not the only names.

Germany, as well as Poland, is a monkey, or a paper clip;

Spain - a measure of weight;

Türkiye - designation of a rose;

Israel - sweet strudel.

There are many meanings, and in each country they can differ significantly.

Cosmic e-mail, what was the first message

In mid-1991, the first letter of this type was sent using AppleLink. Aboard Atlantis, a huge space shuttle, a small Macintosh was used to transmit the following:

In the letter, the crew of STS-43 greeted the Earth, talked about how cool it was in space, and at the end there was a reference to the cult film at that time - the second part of "Terminator". It was this message that was the first of its kind - it would be a truly important and significant day.

Hacking a cartoon email

The mail of the world's most famous lover of donuts and sweets, Homer Simpson, was damaged. Where did you get the address from? Everything is very simple - [email protected] was featured in one of the episodes, so the attackers got food for thought.

The screenwriter of the popular cartoon always tried to respond to fans, but when there were so many of them, they simply stopped using the email account. After the hack, everyone received the same message. Everyone was promised the right to individual access to the latest series - but the archives contained no useful information, only malware.

About painful issues

Almost all Internet users have at some time had to work with e-mail, electronic mail, which is a technology for sending and receiving electronic messages. E-mail, like regular (paper) mail, has its own history, which we will turn to.

It all started at a time when TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) had not yet been developed, and the phrase “a computer for every home” was science fiction. Then in the 70s of the XX century, the largest network was ARPANET, and the computer was an important and expensive piece of equipment. Therefore, many people used one computer at once. For convenience, a program was written that allowed you to leave text messages to other users of the same computer, which was a kind of analogue of today’s guest books and online forums, and the file storing messages was called “Mailbox”. It couldn’t yet be called modern email, because... all correspondence could be conducted only within one computer.

It is worth noting that in 1965 In 2010, employees of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote the MAIL mail program for the CTSS operating system. The authors of the program, Noel Morris and Tom Van Vleck, made it possible to exchange messages within one mainframe (large computer). Many people consider this moment to be the beginning of email. But the history of modern email, which we use now, begins six years later.

At the end 1971 year, programmer Ray Tomlinson wrote a program that made it possible to send messages to a remote computer using the CypNet protocol, which was previously used to transfer files. Received messages were placed in a file - “Mailbox”.

That's how email came about.

Almost immediately he improved the program. Tomlinson developed a system for organizing postal addresses: each computer user was assigned an address consisting of the user name and the network name of his computer, which were separated by @ . This sign denoted the English preposition at (translated into Russian as “on”). Thus, the expression user@machine meant user at machine, i.e. such and such a user on such and such a computer. Tomlinson then continued to improve the program and, in March 1972, made a simple user interface that allowed messages to be sent and downloaded using the network. Six months later, Lawrence Roberts, Tomlinson’s colleague, based on his program, created his own, which had quite a few service functions.

Just a year and a half later, having gained popularity on the ARPANET, email was used to transmit 75% of all data. And in 1975, the first mailing list of letters with useful information appeared. The most popular newsletter was news from the world of science fiction.

In the same year, programmer John Vittal wrote the MSG program, which included all the known functions for working with mail. From that moment on, email reached the state level.

Today, the importance of an email address has risen to the same level as a residential address or mobile phone number. Many email services have appeared, and the second part of the expression user@machine is interpreted differently. Now, instead of machine - a specific computer on which several users worked, we mean a server that provides e-mail services. Such a server serves hundreds of millions of users.

In Russia, among the most popular free servers (for obvious reasons, paid servers cannot reach such heights) are Mail.ru, Yandex.ru, Hotmail.ru and Rambler.ru. All these servers can work with Outlook Express and The Bat!

More than 50 years have passed since the first electronic mail appeared. It was intended for large companies. The development of the Internet played a role and in the 90s the post office eclipsed its main competitors, appearing in almost every home.

Advantages of Email

Every schoolchild knows what an email mailbox is. Most people use snail mail only to send actual items. Personal correspondence increasingly occurs via e-mail. A virtual analogue of post offices is in great demand. This is due to a number of advantages:

• Convenience - there is no need to go to a special institution to receive news from a friend;
• high speed and time saving - delivery is carried out in a few seconds, delays are extremely rare and are eliminated in a short time;
• no need to pay money;
• many functions - folders are provided for various groups of messages; the ability to send one letter to several users; attaching files of various types, including copies of documents.

Psychology and address

An increasing amount of information appears on the Internet. Personal and business communication takes place in the virtual world. Psychologists report that interlocutors often pay attention to even such a detail as an email address. This is important to consider when creating an e-mail. If the box is created with the goal of finding a job or business partner, then it is better to use your real first and last name.

In other cases, you can show your imagination. The address can be the user’s profession or hobbies. The names of musical groups, the names of famous people, the names of sports, favorite colors and much more are actively used. The names of species of rare representatives of flora and sauna, historical events, etc. look unique and beautiful.

There are many options for what kind of email address you can come up with. But you should follow some basic rules:

• Avoid ridiculous words;
• reflect the type of your activity or hobby;
• Do not use your date of birth; if you use numbers, your personal data can be used by scammers.