Timeline of Email

  • 2011 BCE

    2011

    E-Mail is changed to Email.
  • 2008 BCE

    2008

    President Barack Obama, at the time a candidate, compiles a database of over 13 million email addresses.
  • 2007 BCE

    2007

    DKIM, an anti-phishing security protocol is created. In the same year Gmail is made available to the public by Google.
  • 2005 BCE

    2005

    SPF is created, which verifies an email senders identify.
  • 2004 BCE

    2004

    Multimedia emails are introduced
  • 2003 BCE

    2003

    George W. Bush enacts the Law known as CAN-SPAM. A national stranded for commercial emails
  • 1999 BCE

    1999

    Leading on from Spam, an email claiming Bill Gates would share his wealth with internet users circulates, being forwarded millions of time.
  • 1998 BCE

    1998

    Spam becomes an official term in the English Dictionary, for email inconsequential to the user, offering scams etc.
  • 1997 BCE

    1997

    Hotmail is purchased by Microsoft for $400 million.
  • 1997 BCE

    1997

    Microsoft releases Outlook.
  • 1989 BCE

    1989

    The first ISP is started, providing direct access to the internet, instead of limited gateways to the internet.
  • 1985 BCE

    1985

    Emailing is now commonplace, even colleges provide email accounts to their students.
  • 1981 BCE

    1981

    ASCII is used as a standard. Representing characters with numeric code instead so the fewest amount of bits are used to represent text.
  • 1977 BCE

    1977

    Modern emailing using Tomlinson's method can only work on a networked system running the same software.
  • 1971 BCE

    1971

    Ray Tomlinson sends the first email, using @ between the name and the machine the mailbox belongs to.
  • 1965 BCE

    1965

    The first emails were used to copy files from one user directory to anothers