2024-08-01 17:22:47
“Someone had to do it”
40 years of email in Germany: This is what the first message looked like
01.08.2024 – 13:13Reading time: 4 min.
The first email was sent to Germany 40 years ago. Today, several billion emails are sent every day. What has changed and what will happen next.
- 40 years ago the first email was received in Germany.
- Today, despite competition from messenger services, email is still the preferred means of communication in a professional context.
- AI is intended to make email traffic increasingly more secure against spam and phishing.
After the World Wide Web turned 30 years old in April last year, we can now congratulate email on its 40th birthday. The first email in Germany reached its recipient without any formalities, not even a greeting. “We’re happy to have you here,” it said.
Michael Rotert received it on August 3, 1984 at what was then the University of Karlsruhe. “We had no idea how it would revolutionize communication,” says the 74-year-old today on the occasion of the 40th anniversary.
The original aim was to connect the German Research Network to the American CSNET (Computer Science Network). This forerunner of the Internet went into operation in the USA in 1981 and was intended to give universities and colleges free access to a communications network for exchange, as the successor to Karlsruhe University, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), says.
Rotert received the first email, but the impetus in Germany came from Professor Werner Zorn, who was CC’d at the time. Laura Breeden from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) sent the message in English on August 2. With regard to time zones, Rotert sees a clear advantage of email: “You can work asynchronously. The Americans sent the email when they were awake.”
The abbreviation “CC” stands for “carbon copy” and means that each recipient can see the email addresses of all other recipients and use them for their own purposes if necessary. The CC function is best used if you want to send mass emails with the same content to a group whose members know each other and where the sharing and visibility of email addresses is not a problem.
Today, despite all the messenger services and social networks, email is by far the most used means of communication, especially in a professional context, according to a representative survey conducted by the opinion research institute Civey for the Association of the Internet Industry (Eco).
Around two thirds of those surveyed said they regularly use email in a professional environment. For private use, the proportion is a good three quarters, just behind messenger services such as WhatsApp and Telegram.
From the point of view of Michael Hagenau, head of the 1&1 mail brands GMX and Web.de, this is partly due to the open standards on which the technology is based: “No matter which provider you have your email address with, you can always communicate with each other. Messenger services and social networks, on the other hand, only work in a closed circle of members.” This is especially true since local data protection regulations apply to German providers. With 35 million users, Web.de and GMX therefore have a market share of almost 50 percent in this country.
On the other hand, email is the linchpin of digital life. “Everything that is important comes together in the mailbox: contract information, invoices, order confirmations, delivery notifications, newsletters and personal communication,” he says. Email is the most important channel for serious communication with companies and authorities.
For almost every service, from online shops to social networks, registration is done via email. The number of emails sent and received worldwide every day is more than 360 billion, and the trend is rising.
E-mail made its breakthrough in private use thanks to the trend towards home computers in the 1980s and free e-mail services in the 1990s. Since smartphones became widespread, mobile access to mailboxes has been possible.
E-mail is the first choice, especially for formal communication and documentation, says Rotert, Eco’s honorary president. “In terms of form, e-mail has not changed in the last 40 years.” And it basically takes just as long today as it did back then. Technology used to be slower, he says. “Today, e-mails spend more time in providers’ phishing filters.” Web.de and GMX alone say they intercepted around 1.5 billion potentially dangerous spam emails per week last year.
A phishing email is a fraudulent message that aims to obtain sensitive information such as passwords or credit card details by posing as a trustworthy source. They can often be identified by spelling mistakes and urgent requests to disclose personal information. They also often contain links that lead to fake websites. Another clue may be that the email is worded impersonally, such as addressing you as “Dear Customer” instead of your real name.
According to Hagenau, artificial intelligence (AI) will play an increasingly important role here – on both sides: “Internet criminals are constantly developing new tactics to make it more difficult for us to detect spam and phishing emails,” he explains. The text quality of phishing emails is increasing, for example, with the help of language models such as ChatGPT.
But thanks to AI, filters also fish out unwanted messages before they reach the inbox. “Machine learning has proven to be extremely effective in identifying new spam patterns,” explains Hagenau. “AI helps us enormously in controlling the flood of spam.”