If computers, voice mail and cell phones weren’t enough to overwhelm the typical corporate user and blur the boundaries between work and home then email was the next nail in the coffin. In case you have forgotten, Email started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. These systems were primitive and only allowed communication between users who logged into the same host. This came to be useful in large corporations as a means of communicating internally as all employees with a terminal on a mainframe could become an email user. In the 1980s, networked personal computers on Local Area Networks became very useful. Server-based systems similar to the earlier mainframe systems were then developed. Unfortunately, these systems allowed communication only between users logged into the same server just as early systems were limited to users of the same mainframe. Over time, these systems came to be linked together as long as companies were using the same protocol. Eventaually the adoption of ARPANET and later Internet protocols allowed email messages to be sent over the internet efficiently.
Some statistics about email usage in 2010 show that the numbers for email are:
- 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
- 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
- 1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
- 480 million – New email users since the year before.
- 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.
- 262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).
- 2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.
- 25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate.