History of Email and Its Evolution!

Over the decades, emails have grown up as one of the most prevalent and comfortable sources of communication. Today e-mails are more relevant than social media when it comes to digital growth of a business.
In fact, as stated by Forbes “Total number of business and consumer emails sent and received per day will reach 269 billion, and is expected to continue to grow at an average annual rate of 4.4% over the next three years, reaching 319.6 billion by the end of 2021”
So it is inevitable to make continuous improvement and provide higher security to keep the audience engaged.
Let’s have a quick look at the evolution of e-mails in the past few decades.

Present day email compositions are much more lively and colourful and hence, have a better scope of engaging the customer. The graphics and images used, draw readers in and persuade them to consume the rest of your email.
In the initial days, a small group of people used coloured monitors, so images did not have much scope or impact. In contrast, the present day emails are graphics rich. One of the favourite applications is the use of themes to make the emails presentable. The very concept of themes is to allow greater customizations as compared to the older days. It tends to help emails stand apart in the appearance.

There has been a lot done on the use of fonts and formatting of text to the present crop of emails. In fact, most email marketing campaigns allow 100% use of the entire MS word formats and combinations.
Another notable feature is that as more and more mailbox providers introduce new email clients, it becomes necessary to differentiate each offering by some manner or the other. Fonts and their customizations are an easy way to go about making individual presentations to the senders.

Earlier, only some light documents like the word or small ppt presentations could be attached and most of the web-based emails had a limit of 50 KB of attachment size. Compared to the present group of emails, which can handle up to a few MB of attachment size, this factor has come a long way since.
On the practical sense, it has meant the use of more pictures and such large files than the norm in the old days.

The very first days of emails had dial-up arrangements to communicate with the other computers. It meant that emails went on a relay sort of set up from one computer to the other and hence took an inordinate time to reach the recipient.

But today with the evolution of email and the high-speed internet connections one does not expect any delay in communication. You click the ‘Send’ button and in a mili-second, the receiver gets your e-mail. If not, then one of the major reason can be invalid e-mail ID’s, but now there are tools available that can help you filter invalid/duplicate email ID’s so that you have a 100% reach out.

Spam filters were an unexplored arena if we talk about the situation in the history of emails. Later, they did exist but did not perform to the extent possible today. It was mostly a spam filter that people taught it how to identify bad messages.
Contemporary spam filters are pro-active comparatively and few people can try to dodge the system at any time. The power accorded to email spam filters has yielded results that have been exemplary so to speak.

Something like the white list was never heard of in the early days of the email programs. It came about as a common practice to combat spam as it grew beyond the control. The white lists are something of a spam filter that blocks out the entries that are not present in the list in the first place.
The need to clean the email list by getting rid of blacklisting gave rise to the need for the email validation. With many online email validation tools available today, it became easy to include valid email addresses in the list to stay away from blacklisting by the mailbox providers.

Email programs are more flexible today. It has to do a lot more with what is available on hand than to understand what does not work for the customer. Despite the rigid features of the earlier email marketing campaigns, people had their own ingenious ways of overcoming the system most of the time.
In a way, the present day email systems are homogenous in nature. If something new is being organized by one group, then it would soon be followed by the completion most of the time. The technology moat has not been so prominent in each of the cases here.

In the early days of email, the templates were missing or of little use at each instance. It is in the later days of the emails that templates were introduced at each instance. Templates simplify email sending as done in marketing campaigns and hence are a heaven sent for the advertiser and marketing personnel.
Going forward, there is going to be far better templates being made use of in an understandable as well as appealing way. Just by utilizing these themes it’s simple to replicate copies to send out emails to a lot of people to their known addresses.

Having had a brief look at how email programs evolved over time and how the future portends to be; it would be worth noting that emails are here to stay as a cost-effective manner of communication with the user.
Understanding change before it happens is a good sign of a proactive enterprise. Thus, those in front of developing emails systems would be happy to know that emails are still relevant much from those days when the World Wide Web came into existence. Come in and join the ever=spreading network of email marketing.