Thanks Samuel Raymond “Ray” Tomlinson – FormulaPassion.it

Like many inventors, Tomlinson has not become a millionaire. In fact, has not even earned a dollar from the email: “ The fact that still speak of me and of the email origin is my only reward.”

After obtaining the bachelor in Science in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute New York, Ray Tomlinson in 1963 went to MIT to specialize in electrical engineering where he graduated in 1965. in 1967 he joined the BBN Technologies collaborating to ARPANET process, developing the project of transferring files named CPYNET . Implementing she managed to design the email. His last job was in company of electronics and Raytheon military technology.

” Of all the inventions digital era is the most widespread, the most trivialized, perhaps one that more than any other has invaded our lives. Essential, and for this bloody many times a day. But the email had an inventor. It was the American Ray Tomlinson. His invention of the online messages, someone still called “electronic mail” – a little ‘how to call Twitter “Digital telegraph” – dates back to 1971. Unbelievable. Because for the vast majority of us the “discovery” of email is much more late, it get a quarter of a century later. I thought of being a veteran because I still have the AOL address so popular in California in the late nineties …

According to his biographies Tomlinson after his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) he was working in a company in Boston when he began to study a way to send messages via computer that was both easier and universal existing electronic messaging until the seventies. Among his ideas was the “spiral us”, the @ sign that has become universal for email addresses. In English, the choice was easy, that sign it is written “at” which is indicative of the place preposition. It ‘also the only preposition available on a computer keyboard, as he explained. Tomlinson in an interview with Verge in 2012 remembered that at the time of his invention the world of messaging was to prehistoric times were not widespread answering machines so almost no one could “leave a message” to those who were not available to answer a call. The idea of ​​being able to deposit a readable message on a computer seemed revolutionary. And it was. “
Federico Rampini, The Republic March 7, 2016

“Despite the continuous and relentless transformation of the network using the good old email remains a so-called” killer application “that is one of the most important uses and spread all over the Web. e-mail has a story much longer than the Web. Moreover, since the Internet is dominated by pages full of images, animations, and more and more eye-catching visual effects, simply e-mail appears a bit ‘primitive .. and according to experts the electronic message traffic expected to grow. The e-mail it is preparing to live a second life as a marketing tool among the most effective in the new era of e-business and online commerce. And, as often we have used economic phenomena of the Internet, around the old e-mail could be moved soon billion-dollar.

It’s the 1972 when the first e-mail message is sent; the text of that message was nothing more than a series of characters typed at random. Ray Tomlinson did not know that with that test message was inaugurating the most powerful written communications system in the world. Today in the US alone are sent 300 million messages a day and according CyberDialogue, in the course of their lives an average user goes online 23.5 months of which 9.8 are dedicated to e-mail. If in 1995 in the United States the amount of sent e-mail exceeded that of paper, today the comparison is not even remotely possible. They are currently more than 400 million addresses in the first three months of 1999 have been opened across the planet 57 million new virtual mailboxes.

From all investigations carried out, in fact, it appears that the good in demand on the Net is not pornography, MP3 music or sports information but e-mail and it is no coincidence that even people who do not own a computer or an Internet connection , instead often they possess an e-mail address. The boom, of course, is also commercial. According to Forrester Research, by 2004, as soon as the company will take full consciousness of the power of this medium, we will be sent over 200 billion e-mail for marketing purposes. Each family will receive on average 9 per day. These companies will spend approximately $ 4.8 billion in contact with by e-mail clients: 3.2 for customer care and 1.6 for the acquisition of new clients. No technological innovation has spread in so little time. The phone took 40 years to reach 10 million subscribers, half the time the fax, and email it took only a year.

So, experts promise that email will always plus one of the key elements in the digital business. And it is understandable: if the trade moves online, also contacts with customers must follow the same channels. Indeed analysts predict that in the glittering world of bits, where the competition will become increasingly tight, those who manage to survive better pampered their valuable customers. As they say in technical terms to “loyalty”. For this, one of the most important divisions of each company for e-commerce and so-called “call center”, what once would have been a switchboard and is now increasingly the place to manage e-mail clients.

in call centers are entrusted with all the important activities related to customer care, that is one of the fundamental components of marketing strategies in the digital age. According Andreina Mandelli and Andrea Farinet, experts of the New Economy of the Bocconi University of Milan, just the customer care will be one of the business sectors which will develop more in the future: “By now many companies both at Italian level international are interacting more and more off-line marketing activities with those online. Within those on line, email is the main tool of interaction that characterizes the network, so the relationship with users. Obviously this type of tool is always enriched more in the coming months and years to come, especially from a technological point of view, and will allow companies to be able to greatly enhance the possibility of integration with mobile phones with technology wop and with the UMTS technology and the development of images and audio. Then the email will be a tool that will increase the content and that companies will use in this process of interaction with their users, especially in a retention effort. In America you start to talk about permition marketing namely the choice of the ‘right balance between company and user, and then a very delicate balance in which individual users will have the option to choose what kind of emails they wish to receive on that type of themes and at what stage of the day or week. “

Among the emails that users receive every day, there are some who come from so-called mailing lists. Also mailing lists are not new and, indeed, were among the first means of dissemination of information through the Internet. There are mailing lists that deal with various topics and those interested enrolled, of course by sending an e-mail , and receives messages with the latest news on the chosen subject. All this e-mail traffic, however, could also lead to some abuse. It is good to remember that even in the use of electronic mail, as always, you have to respect some rule of good manners. The rules of etiquette on the Net are those of netiquette, ie the net label. With the explosion of e-mail as a marketing tool in fact the problem of spam is likely to worsen. Besides, this practice is encouraged by two factors.

First of all send thousands of copies of a message is dirt cheap. And then it turned out that, although in general the users complain, the technique works. A survey of Ernst & amp; Young revealed that 14 percent of users visiting the sites reported through e-mails advertising. It may seem little, but as we have just seen that sending thousands of messages costs almost nothing, spamming proves an effective technique. In addition, the publicity that comes through e-mail is clicked from 3 to 10 times more often than the one published on a Web page. In fact often the line between marketing and spam appears to be quite thin, with the risk of exaggerating and trigger a form of rejection by the users. That’s what they think Mandelli and Farinet: “It is a reciprocal problem and therefore what expectations Net users have regarding the contents and what is the range of services that comes from companies. Indeed especially the Italian public has some initial mistrust of online communication, in declaring and giving a profile of themselves, in order not to run the risk of becoming the subject of a number of items apart from those who are his specific interests. This is important and is a problem of culture that Italian companies must face substantially closer to reality maybe of other more developed countries that approach in a more gentle, more delicate and in a permition marketing logic, the user, who in this way can define himself what are his needs knowledge. “
By Antonio Leonardi, Michael Alberico, Elena Capparelli
the email levied – On average , April 21, 2000