It's time to drop the E from email, it's just mail

The e, which stands for electronic, in email is redundant. It has been for years.

It is time to stop talking about email and refer to the technology for sending messages between computers as mail.

And that’s before we start worrying if mail is dying. It isn’t. But it is changing.

Born in the 1970s

Electronic mail was born in the 1970s. It first hit its stride in the 1980s, although at that stage most mail systems were restricted to sites, campuses or companies.

My first mail account was when I worked for the UK's Science and Engineering Research Council at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory site in the mid-1980s. We had a site wide mail service at RAL, but could also communicate offsite with colleagues at CERN in Geneva using the Janet network. From memory, messages travelled at a leisurely 9.6 kilobytes per second.

At the time logging into the mail network felt like beaming into the future. Getting messages from other sites seemed remarkable.

New Zealand gets mail

I arrived for my new job in New Zealand at The Dominion in Wellington in 1987. At that stage it was strictly typewriters, phones and fax machines. Two years later we installed an editorial system which included a form of mail, but only within the building and to the branch office in Auckland.

At around the same time the first commercial online service arrived in New Zealand. Compuserve had a mail service, but, once again, in the early you could only send messages to other Compuserve accounts.

New Zealand's original Compuserve network was connected to the world via a submarine cable link to Australia. It piggybacked off connections used by other companies. You could get a reasonably fast turnaround on messages from Monday to Friday, but the connection didn't run at the weekend, the company leasing the connection to Compuserve used it to transfer data between its New Zealand and Australian branches.