The invention of email is generally attributed to the American programmer Ray Tomlinson in 1971: he sent the first email that travelled via a network between two different computers to reach its recipient. However, computer-based messaging began earlier than this and has changed considerably since then.

Previous topics: messages within a single machine

In the 1960s, multiple users worked simultaneously on a single mainframe computer (time-sharing systems), and it was already possible to leave messages for one another on these systems. One well-known example is the MAIL command from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s CTSS system in 1965. However, the message could only be delivered to users on the same machine.

1971: the first network email

Tomlinson worked at BBN (Bolt, Beranek and Newman), which was involved in the development of ARPANET, regarded as the precursor to the internet; the network was funded by the research agency of the US Department of Defence. In 1971, he supplemented an on-machine messaging program called SNDMSG with the code for his own file-transfer program, CPYNET, thereby enabling messages to be sent via ARPANET to a mailbox on another computer. He sent the first test emails between two computers standing side by side; he himself could not recall their content, which was probably a meaningless string of letters. Some sources, such as the Computer History Museum, date the work to 1972.

The @ symbol

To distinguish the username from the machine on which the mailbox is located, Tomlinson introduced the format felhasználó@gép. He chose the @ symbol because it did not occur in usernames and is naturally readable in English (‘at’). Other networks initially used different symbols; the @ symbol only became widespread by the end of the 1980s. In Hungarian, it is known as a ‘kukac’.

Standards and milestones

• 1982: the SMTP standard (RFC 821) was published, describing how servers exchange emails; ARPANET began using it in 1983. An enhanced version of this standard is still in use today, as described in our article on SMTP servers.
• The 1980s: using the POP and IMAP protocols, users could access their mailboxes on the server from their own computers via an email client.
• 1992: the MIME standard made it possible to send attachments, text containing accented characters and non-Latin characters, and later, emails formatted in HTML.
• Mid-1990s: with the advent of webmail – that is, email accessible via a web browser – email became an everyday tool for the general public.

Email today

The basic principle has hardly changed in over five decades: emails still reach the recipient’s server via SMTP, and email addresses still take the form név@domain. What has been added since then is primarily security: encrypted connections (TLS), spam filtering, and SPF, DKIM and DMARC records that authenticate the sender – which major email service providers now require as standard from bulk senders.

An address with an extension to your own domain has become an essential calling card for any business. To this end, our email hosting plans provide a mailbox with Roundcube webmail, IMAP and POP3 access, spam filtering and daily backups.