March 13, 2008

Inventor of email did not think about spam

Having the privilege of sending the very first email ever sent, is something that only the inventor of the system could claim, but when Ray Tomlinson thought up the email system one thing that never even popped into his mind was the fact that one day people would use this system to send junk mail or what it is generally known as, SPAM!

Originally messages could be sent from different terminals which were connected to the same network, which was how the first message was sent in 1971 over a distance of one metre. But as computing began to expand so did the way that computers communicated with each other and so the Send Message Program changed to email.

E-mail in numbers:

170 billion: Number of e-mails sent worldwide each day
2 million: Number of e-mails sent each second
49 minutes: Average time an office works spends each day managing e-mail
34: Percentage of internal company e-mails that office workers say are ‘unnecessary’
30-40: Number of times per hour workers check their e-mail

Email has become a the communication preference for many people, its fast and direct, however SPAM is an issued that has clouded how successful this tool has become for both business and personal use.

Source [Times]