13 Fun Email Facts That You Might Not Know. Dive into the fascinating world of email with fun facts you may not know—or ones you’ve seen in every blog post on the topic.

• Email existed before the World Wide Web — and possibly before 1971.
• The @ symbol was introduced specifically for email addressing.
• The first email marketing campaign generated an estimated $13 million in sales.
• AOL’s "You’ve Got Mail" voice was recorded by someone whose wife worked at AOL.
• Hotmail’s name hides HTML inside it.
• The Queen of England was the first head of state to send an email.
• The word "Spam" came from Monty Python, not the meat.
• Email can trigger the brain’s reward system similar to addictive substances.
• Gmail and Facebook both launched in 2004 — a pivotal tech year.
• One of the most destructive email-borne viruses in history arrived with the subject line "ILOVEYOU".

• Was email really invented in 1971? Not exactly. While Ray Tomlinson’s 1971 message is the widely accepted "first email," computer-based messaging existed earlier — including MIT’s CTSS system in 1965.
• Why does email use the @ symbol? Ray Tomlinson chose @ as a separator between user and machine names — a simple decision that became a global standard for digital identity.
• What was the first email marketing campaign? In 1978, Gary Thuerk sent what’s considered the first marketing email, resulting in about $13 million in revenue.
• What was the first email attachment? In 1992, thanks to MIME, the first email attachment became possible — and the first file sent was an image.
• Who recorded the iconic "You’ve Got Mail" message? Former broadcaster Elwood Edwards, whose wife worked at AOL, recorded the line at home for internal demos — unintentionally creating a cultural icon.
• Why was Hotmail spelled "HoTMaiL"? Because it contains HTML, highlighting that it was one of the first web-based email services.
• Who was the first head of state to send an email? Queen Elizabeth II, who sent her first message via ARPANET in 1976 — long before email became mainstream.

What do unwanted emails and a reconstituted luncheon meat product have in common? They are both referred to as ‘Spam’. Whilst one was important to both soldiers and civilians during the Second World War to combat shortages of meat products, the other is just a modern nuisance.

But why do they share a name? Its relation to email actually comes from a famous Monty Python sketch. In said sketch, a menu is read aloud to two customers that, as it progresses, increasingly contains more and more Spam (the luncheon meat) – something that one of the customers doesn’t want yet the waitress fails to understand. After a while – and about a million mentions of ‘Spam’ – a random group of Vikings (this is Monty Python after all) start singing ‘Spam’ repeatedly, much to the annoyance of the waitress who screams for them to shut up.

You can see why it relates so well to unwanted and unsolicited emails! And to cement its place in our common lexicon, it was added as a term referring to unwanted messages to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1998.

Meme.

We start our list of fun email facts with something controversial. Spicy.

Whilst 1971 is generally given as the date that email was born, thanks to Ray Tomlinson and his ‘QWERTYUIOP’ message sent using the ARPANET network, this is also disputed.

If we are classifying email as a computer-based messaging system, email can trace its origins back to the 1960s, most notably to messages sent electronically between computers by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) project in 1965. The history of email just got longer… Happy 57th birthday!

Also, mind-bender coming at you: email actually predates the World Wide Web.

Meme.

Our old friend Ray Tomlinson is back. As to not take away his crowning achievement of sending the first email, he was also the person who enabled us to send messages directly to specific users on specific machines. He decided that this would be done using the humble ‘@’ sign.

Who knew that years down the line, millions of people would be signing up for email accounts using his method? Though I doubt he would have thought there would be an email address out there called ‘mattlovesapastry1121@hotmail.co.uk’… (and yes, this has been deactivated).

Gary Thuerk could have increased his $13 million ROI even further from the first-ever email marketing campaign in 1978 (for the Digital Equipment Company in the USA) if he sent it in 1992.

Why? Well thanks to a helpful new internet protocol that revels in the snappy name of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, emails went from solely text-based to being able to have attachments. And the first attachment was an image. And we know that the combo of engaging copy and great imagery and design is a winner for email ROI.

Meme.

Not a Hollywood rom-com starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, but the life of one of email’s most recognizable voices. If you were using email in the ’90s, or have just seen a few 90’s workplace dramas or sitcoms, you may be familiar with AOL’s famous ‘You’ve Got Mail’ voice-based notification.

The voice behind it belongs to former broadcaster and voice actor turned Uber driver – Elwood Edwards. So how did he get such a prestigious gig and have his voice heard by millions? His wife worked at AOL and asked him to record a few lines for it. Right place, right time… a bit like what you’d want from a good Uber driver. It’s nice when life throws coincidences like that at you! Elwood – you’re a bonafide legend.

Who remembers Hotmail? I do, given that I’ve already told you my old email address (again, it’s deactivated). Now rebranded as Outlook, Hotmail was launched by Microsoft in 1996. They chose to name it as such for two reasons:

• They wanted a name with ‘mail’ in it, since it was an email service.
• It included the letters HTML in that order, which is also the markup language used to create web pages and many emails. You can see this in the presentation of the name in the original logo: HoTMaiL.

Communicating via email is second nature to us now, even those who may not have grown up with it. And it’s a great social leveler – available to, and used by anyone, no matter their social standing.

But who, in the higher echelons of society, got to grips with it first? Well, if we are talking heads of state, that accolade goes to Queen Elizabeth II – who became the first head of state to send an email in 1976 using the ARPANET system.

Note – for anyone who doesn’t think the Queen makes the rules – I’m British, and can confirm that she does.

Meme.

Some say that technology rules our existence. There might even be some truth in that. But there is no denying that, if totally true, 2004 was a key year. Why? Well, something called ‘Facebook’ launched as a social networking website at Harvard University. But more importantly for email, Gmail also launched. And it quickly became the most widely used email service in the world.

It may also interest you to know that in 2004, Gmail was launched against some already-established companies. Hotmail (now Outlook) started in 1996, Yahoo Mail launched in 1997, and Apple Mail began in 2001. So Gmail is technically the ‘new boy’ amongst the big players.

Official secrets used to be passed around in blank brown envelopes by people in trench coats, sunglasses and hats. Now that mantle belongs to email, but this doesn’t eliminate the risk of stuff going wrong.

In 2000, an 11-year-old schoolgirl from the UK was accidentally included on a top-secret email list from the Pentagon. She received emails containing highly sensitive intelligence on UK intel secrecy, New Zealand’s naval defense strategy, and communication issues aboard Royal Navy vessels.

Given the magnitude of what she was receiving in her inbox, you’d think that this would be quickly rectified. And it was… 4 years and many emails later.

Who says you need Aston Martin’s, vodka martinis and field training to be a great spy – all you need is an inbox and a slip up at the Pentagon.

Meme.

Remember Y2K? Maybe not, because it never happened – despite the proclamations of people who conveniently had a fallout bunker in their back yard or basement. But a technological armageddon did sort of happen in the year 2000 with the ILOVEYOU worm.

This was a computer virus that infected millions of computers worldwide, spreading rapidly via a seemingly innocent email titled ‘ILOVEYOU’ that also had an attachment. Opening the attachment released the worm into your system, where it would overwrite random files and send a copy of itself to any email addresses it could find. It infected over 10 million PCs globally.

Ordinarily, that would be a total disaster but, given the sheer speed and breadth at which it spread around the world, it’s actually a great indicator of just how many people were regularly using email. It’s also a great lesson in phishing attacks and global cyber security. It even inspired a song by the Pet Shop Boys, which is what we all want from life.