Email validation and deliverability company ZeroBounce announces the launch of Email Day, an annual celebration of the most widely used application in the world.
ZeroBounce officially registered Email Day as April 23, the birthday of Ray Tomlinson, who invented email in late 1971. Five decades later, more than half of the world’s population has an email account.
“Ray Tomlinson revolutionized the way people communicate. Email removed time and space barriers and brought us closer. It improved the way businesses operate and keep in touch with customers. Email is vital to virtually any online activity and is also the object of our business and passion at ZeroBounce. Email Day recognizes this world-changing innovation and the man who dreamt it up,” says ZeroBounce CEO Liviu Tanase.
As a tribute to Ray Tomlinson, Email Day aims to raise awareness around email best practices and highlight the benefits of using email thoughtfully. With more than four billion email accounts and growing, email presents vulnerabilities and risks. ZeroBounce’s mission is to help senders mitigate these risks, land more emails in the inbox and communicate effectively.
Ray Tomlinson developed ARPANET’s first system able to send messages from one machine to another. He created the @ sign to separate the recipient’s name from the name of their host. It was the birth of network email, and user@host became the standard format for email addresses.
Email became the most widely used application in the world, and the @ sign is now a universal symbol. For his contributions, Ray Tomlinson was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.
In speaking with ZeroBounce, Ray Tomlinson’s daughter Suzanne describes her father as a “warm, kind-hearted” person. “His co-workers appreciated his open-door policy and his willingness to let people bounce ideas off of him,” Suzanne Tomlinson Schaffer told ZeroBounce. “He had a unique sense of humor and an incredible intellect. Although he received a lot of recognition for the creation of email, he always remained very modest.”
Ray Tomlinson passed away in 2016, at the age of 74.
