More than half a century later, email remains the world’s favourite messenger

More than half of the world’s population has an email address

Ray Tomlinson, the man who invented email.

In this era when platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and TikTok appear to be the primary beasts striding across the social media universe, there remains one form of communication over half a century old that still dominates them all. 

This year marks 55 years since the first email was sent, an invention that turned the @ sign into a global standard and cultural touchstone instantly recognisable across most nations of the earth. Not only resisting more recent innovations such as texting, the ubiquitous email has often been likened to ‘the bicycle of the internet’ - simple, reliable, and consistent. The statistics around email usage in 2026 are as impressive as they are staggering, with more than half of the world’s population having an email address, and up to 5bn users daily. 

Its penetration exceeds that of every social media platform and messaging app, with over 370bn emails sent and received per day. Regardless of an ever-changing technological world, the volume of email continues to grow annually, driven by transactional memos, marketing campaigns, newsletters, automated notifications, and personal communication. The infrastructure required to move this volume, including Simple Mail Transfer Protocol servers, Domain Name System lookups, spam filters and storage systems, represents one of the largest continuously operating distributed systems ever built. As it turned out, that humble @ symbol we use many times daily only became what it is now because of a small decision taken in the early days of email. When Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate Ray Tomlinson sent the first email in 1971, he chose the @ icon - an obscure character commonly called the ‘at’ symbol. 

Credited as the inventor of email on the ARPANET system, the predecessor to the Internet, Tomlinson revolutionised the way businesses operated and how people would communicate throughout the world. Yet, for a few decades after Tomlinson’s invention, email was still seen as a business only tool. It was only when the personal computer entered the public domain in the late 1980s as an affordable tool in many homes, email became widespread.

“I see email being used, by and large, exactly the way I envisioned,” Tomlinson said years later. “In particular, it is not strictly a work tool or strictly a personal thing. Everybody uses it in different ways, but they use it in a way they find works for them.” Tomlinson, who died in 2016, was asked many times what exactly was the content of that first ever email he wrote. “I really can’t remember, but probably something like QWERTYUIOP - the top row of letters on an English-language keyboard. Either way, it turned out to be a neat idea and I’m glad it worked.” As a suitable epitaph to honour the humble man who changed the world, the Internet Hall of Fame states: “Tomlinson’s email program brought about a complete revolution, fundamentally changing the way people communicate.” Fifty-five years later, it remains the foundation of how the internet communicates, transacts, authenticates, and does business.

Thirty years after email was invented, another emblem of the world’s technological progress entered the scene – Gmail. Launched on April 1st, 2001, it offered an entire gigabyte of storage, a huge amount compared to other email providers like Hotmail and Yahoo at the time. The 1 GB allowed users to hang on to 13,500 emails, compared to competitors’ maximum of 60. It also allowed users to find an old email instantly – a benefit described by one tech magazine as “mind blowing and groundbreaking.” 

Even though this innovation from Google was initially taken as an April Fool’s joke, Gmail accounts became so sought after they sold on eBay for €250 and upwards. Within a few years, platforms like Hotmail, AOL and CompuServe were edged out due to their limited storage, cluttered interfaces, and problematic email retrieval. In the same way that Ray Tomlinson created the early email system through a creative desire to improve communications, Paul Buchheit, a Google engineer, invented Gmail in a similar vein of altruism. 

The idea started in 2001 as a ‘20% project,’ where Google allowed engineers to spend 20% of their time working on side projects – an area Buchheit would go on to excel at. “My email was a mess. Important messages were hopelessly buried, and conversations were a jumble. I couldn't always get to my email because it was stuck on one computer, and web interfaces were unbearably clunky. And I had spam - a lot of it. With Gmail I got the opportunity to change email — to build something that would work for me, not against me. We wanted to build something that would make email feel fast, searchable, and much more useful.”