: Google celebrates 50 years of email as Gmail reaches 3 bn users #IndiaNEWS #Google Ray Tomlinson, a computer programmer, sent the very first email 50 years ago this month. Now, Google is joining

Google celebrates 50 years of email as Gmail reaches 3 bn users #IndiaNEWS #Google
Ray Tomlinson, a computer programmer, sent the very first email 50 years ago this month. Now, Google is joining with Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo Mail, The Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG), and others in celebrating Tomlinsons innovation and 50 years of email.

Tomlinson was a programmer working on ARPANET, the system that laid the groundwork for what would become the internet as we know it today.

He tested the messaging system by sending emails to himself, and later said that the first note was probably something like QWERTYUIOP.

More than 30 years after this breakthrough, a Google engineer named Paul Buchheit conducted his own email experiments.

Buchheit described the problem he was trying to solve: My email was a mess. Important messages were hopelessly buried, and conversations were a jumble. I couldnt 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.

These pain points are part of what motivated him to come up with a better system Gmail.

Buchheit created Gmail as a browser-based email program that allowed users to easily search their own messages.

With Gmail, I got the opportunity to change email to build something that would work for me, not against me, he had said.

Eventually, Gmail was launched to the public on April 1, 2004.

It had lightning fast email search and a storage limit of 1 GB which was 500 times more than prevailing inboxes of the time and a lot of people thought it was an April Fools Day hoax, Google said in a statement.

Gmail is now part of Google Workspace, the integrated solution that spans Docs, Slides, Sheets, Meet, Chat, and more and that is home to more than 3 billion global users.

On any given day, Google Workspace now prevents more than 100 million harmful emails from reaching Gmail users.

Our machine learning models have evolved to understand and filter new threats, and we continue to block more than 99. 9 percent of spam, phishing, and malware from reaching our users, said Neil Kumaran, Senior Product Manager, Counter-Abuse Technology.

Before Tomlinson turned the @ symbol into a vehicle for connecting people in the early digital age, the symbol spent centuries in obscurity.

Referred to as the snail by Italians, and the monkey tail by the Dutch, the humble @ does not have a clear origin story, but we know it was used in shipping records during the 16th century.

The @ symbol has come a long way since Tomlinson sent that first email 10 feet, 50 years ago.

While the most obvious modern uses of the @ symbol have been in email addresses and Twitter handles, its recently become a crucial part of transforming collaboration in Google Workspace with smart canvas.