E-mail: not where it's @ any more

Fifteen years ago we marvelled at e-mail’s ability to offer free, instant communication. Now, plagued by spam and under threat from Facebook’s new messaging sytem, it’s the new snail mail

NINETY TRILLION. That’s the number of e-mails sent over the internet last year. On average we collectively click and send 247 billion of them every day, or about two million every second. So perhaps, you might argue, the announcement this week of the death of e-mail was a bit premature. The patient seems not only alive and kicking but positively robust.

E-mail’s imminent demise was proclaimed in the wake of Facebook’s launch of an integrated messaging service that pulls together internet chat, text messages, messaging services within Facebook and, for now, e-mail.

Some commentators say such a service will make e-mail on its own considerably less attractive, not least because the communication format has become a spammer’s paradise.

Consider the evidence. It is estimated that more than 80 per cent of all e-mail sent is spam: unsolicited and generally unwanted commercial e-mail touting questionable products, unlikely lottery winnings and financial scams.

It wasn’t always this way. I got my first e-mail account in 1986 through Trinity College Dublin. I was one of the first postgraduates outside of the computer-science and engineering departments to apply for one. Back then spam was rare.

No doubt that was because the number of people using e-mail was extremely limited. To have an e-mail address a person generally had to be within an academic, government or technology-company environment. Ireland at that time had no consumer internet-service provider. Internet connectivity was provided to universities and to some large organisations, but that was pretty much it.

Receiving and sending e-mail was a privilege, and it was quite exciting to check your mailbox and see whether you had any new messages from the select group of friends, colleagues or relatives who might also have internet access somewhere in the world.

The fact that it was absolutely free to send a message of any size anywhere on the globe was extraordinary then, though now it seems banal. It seemed bizarre that it was free.

Some found it impossible to imagine. My father, an academic at the University of California, also had an e-mail address in the 1980s, and we chatted back and forth weekly with gusto using this wonderful new electronic format. In bafflement, my mother kept asking, “But how much does it cost to mail each one?”

Yet e-mail had been around long before our discovery of it. Its forerunner is considered to have been a computer messaging system called Mailbox used at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid-1960s. Users on a small network of computers within a building could send each other messages. This seems pretty dull now but caused great excitement at the time, presaging the phenomenon today of colleagues sending e-mails to each other rather than speaking, even when their desks are just a few metres apart.

Proper e-mail is credited to an engineer named Ray Tomlinson, who came up with the idea in 1971. He worked for an early computing company called Bolt Beranek and Newman on the forerunner of the internet, called Arpanet, and realised that the telephone-line connections between computers could enable people to send messages across larger networks.

Rather arbitrarily, he picked the @ sign on the computer keyboard to indicate where a message was being sent, initially in the format of username@, followed by the name of a particular computer on the network.

That general format, simple and understandable, has remained in use as an internet standard to this day, though now a domain name appears on the other side of the @ rather than the name of a single computer.

Within a few years there were hundreds of users of this new communication format on Arpanet, and e-mail had become the single most popular application on the network. By the late 1970s three-quarters of all the traffic on Arpanet was e-mail. No wonder that when, in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, personal computers began to come onto the market via companies like Apple and IBM, people wanted to be able to use e-mail themselves at home.

A plethora of e-mail programs sprang up, alongside home internet-service providers. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s e-mail was one of personal computing’s selling points and drove demand for consumer internet connections. The arrival in the 1990s of the world wide web sparked even more interest in the net. It offered a visual, windows-based way of accessing information on the internet that had been available as text files only. And while people got online to use the web, their most frequent use of their connection remained e-mail.

And why not? It was a modern marvel. For no cost at all you could send e-mail everywhere, attaching files, photographs and eventually videos. So popular is e-mail that it began to demolish swathes of long-standing business sectors. Why send a letter when you could send an e-mail? Why buy an analogue camera when with a digital one you could attach photos and e-mail them to your friends and relatives?

Businesses hardly knew how to deal with e-mail at first. Some refused to get e-mail addresses for any but the most senior management, fearing employees would waste time with it. And of course they do. But it is also one of the most important tools for office productivity.

By now we live in a world where we are expected to be always available and immediately ready to respond to an e-mail request. And as the masses flooded online, so did the mass junk marketers, with a deluge of spam.

Then came new communication technologies, such as internet chat, text messaging and Twitter, to enable faster and more immediate conversations, making e-mail’s role less central. The fact that these formats are mostly spam-free also makes them attractive. Hence the great interest generated by Facebook’s announcement. But are we really ready to send our very last e-mail? To let go of our @ signs? Almost certainly, the answer is no. At least, not yet.