1965 – Email is introduced at MIT.

 

1971 – Raymond Tomlinson allegedly sent “QWERTYUIOP” as the first email message ever sent.

 

1977 – A standard format (RFC 733) is proposed to enable sending email across the internet.

 

1977 – U.S. Postal Service foresees email as a potential threat to mail volumes.

 

1981 – The American Standard Code for Information Interchange adopted a process of letters, punctuation and symbols to digitally store information.

 

1982 – First use of the word “email.”

 

1985 – Most users of email are Government and military employees, students and academic professionals.

 

1988 – The first commercial email product, Microsoft Mail is released for the Mac.

 

1989CompuServe offers Internet connectivity and email to its subscribers.

 

1989IBM releases Lotus Notes 1.0.

 

1991 – Email spam begins.

 

1993 – BellSouth and IBM unveil Simon Personal Communicator, the world’s first mobile phone with PDA features, including email capability.

 

1993AOL and Delphi connect their proprietary email systems to the Internet.

 

1992 – Microsoft Outlook for MS-DOS is released.

 

1996 – Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launch “HoTMail,” one of the first free Web-based email services.

 

1997 – Microsoft Outlook 97 is released, offering a central hub that includes email, scheduling, contact management, task management and a journal module.

 

1997Yahoo! introduces Yahoo! Mail.

 

1997 – Microsoft purchases Hotmail for approximately $400 million.

 

1998 – “You’ve Got Mail” premiers at the box office.

 

1998 – HTML and rich text formatting is introduced to email messages.

 

2000 –  Microsoft launches Outlook 2000 which includes the ability to incorporate personal, corporate and Web-based information in one place.

 

2000 – Microsoft introduces Entourage mail for Mac.

2000 – First public mention of the idea to create mail sender DNS records, later to become known as SPF.

 

2004Google launches Gmail on April 1st.

 

2003 – The BlackBerry smartphone is introduced to the public.

 

2004 – The Federal Trade Commission passes email spam laws.

 

2011Associated Press Stylebook changes “e-mail” to email.

 

2012 – In the United States, 90 million Americans access email through a mobile device, with 64% of them doing it on a daily basis.

2013 – There are more than 3 billion email accounts across the globe, and approximately 294 billion emails are sent per day.

2013 – The first domains start to adopt a DMARC policy.

2014 – In April 2014, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published SPF (Sender Policy Framework) in RFC 7208 as a proposed standard.

2015 – Groupon became the company that sends the most email. Groupon sent 388 emails on average per user. (Source: unroll.me)

2015 – Microsoft launches Office 365 email and it quickly becomes Microsofts most profitable product.

2016 – During the 2016 US elections, Hillary Clinton makes headlines for using a “private email server.”

2017 – Aproximatley half of the world population uses email as the global number of daily email users hits 3.7 billion.

2018 – 76% of businesses reported being a victim of a phishing attack

2019 – 80 percent of business email domains continue to lack DMARC protection

2019 – Phishing accounts for 90% of data breaches

Sources: Microsoft, Mashable, Macworld, AP Stylebook, Wikipedia.