For the last 30 years, the most popular computer application
on the Internet has been email. 30 Years? Yes. The first email
application was built in 1971 and upgraded in 1972. With the
upgrade, email became a widely used and really popular computer
application. But, 30 years? Yes indeed. Don't take my word for
it, check out "Hobbes' Internet Timeline - the Definitive
ARPAnet and Internet History" at:
http://www.zakon.org/robert/Internet imeline/
Granted, most of us had never heard much if anything at all
about the Internet until the mid 1990's. The world's first
Internet "browser" was released in 1993, it was called Mosaic.
Until the release of Mosaic, the net was strictly for nerds,
government employees and university's. The net was restricted
to command line use of email, document storage and databases.
With the release of Mosaic, the web finally had a visual
interface.
1993 was year that the flood gates began to open. With Mosaic
coming online, the White House finally got its own domain at:
http://www.WhiteHouse.gov
and Bill Clinton became the first U.S. President ever to have
his own email address: president@whitehouse.gov
Though the technology and speed of the Internet has constantly
changed throughout the last 30 years, one thing has not
changed, the popularity of email.
"Email is one of the 'Killer Apps' of the computer world. Email
is the most successful communications technology since the
television, and in a few years will even surpass that. There
are currently more than 891 million email accounts in use
Worldwide and 440 million in the U.S. alone - with an average
of more than 4 email accounts per person." (Messaging Today -
2000 Electronic Mailbox Report - Feb. 21, 2001)
The top providers for email service in the world today are
Hotmail (with 86 million users), Yahoo (with 53 million users)
and AOL (with 30 million users).
Email has become so popular that in 1998, Hollywood made a
movie about two people who used email to get to know one
another and fall in love. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan starred in
the hit movie "You've Got Mail," named for the most cherished
voice message on the AOL service.
http://youvegotmail.warnerbros.com/
Statistics show that the majority of people check their email
first before they do anything else. In fact, people spend the
vast majority of their time online reading and answering emails.
While managing multiple email accounts might seem like the
biggest challenge facing Internet users today, it is not. The
biggest challenge is having one computer and a household full
of people who want to check their email. I run a business
online, but if I do not give the computer up to my wife once
in awhile, I would not want to live in my house anymore.
Remember when AOL decided to give their customers seven
accounts so that everyone in the family could have their own
email address and profile? At first it seemed like a good
idea... Then it started... Now you have four people standing
behind you begging to check their email! And the joy of AOL,
you have to log off of one account to check email from another
account. What a bear.
The good news is that as with the progression of the Internet
over the last 30 years, new technological breakthroughs are
always improving our lives. In the last few years, email
notification systems have come into being. Email Notification
software enables you to check multiple email accounts through
one handy little application.
In the early days of email notification software, the interfaces
were clumsy and difficult to use. This may explain why less than
one half of one percent of the net population has ever
downloaded one of these applications. If you were to total up
number of downloads for email notification software on CNET,
ZDNet, and TUCOWS combined, it would not be surprising if the
total did not exceed 500,000 downloads in the last five years.
Most people do not even realize that applications like this
exist. What is more, people who have heard about them often
assume that only a computer guru would be knowledgeable enough
to set it up. Maybe that was the case... in the old days, but
certainly not today.
Today, we have available to us a program called ePrompter
(http://www.eprompter.com?ep2) which is a Free email retrieval
and notification utility that automatically checks up to eight
password protected email accounts for AOL, AltaVista, Earthlink,
Email.com, Hotmail, Juno, Lycos, Mail.com, Mindspring, Netscape,
POP3, Rediffmail, USA, Yahoo, ZDNetOneBox and hundreds of other
email domains all at the same time.
ePrompter is great. I do not have to let my wife or the kids
have the computer to check their email anymore. I can keep my
ePrompter open and show them that there is nothing there for
them to check. I do not even have to log off of my primary AOL
account to check the email inside of another AOL account.
ePrompter painlessly handles the details for me.
What is more, I can watch the rotating tray icon down by my
clock, which keeps me appraised of how many emails are in each
account by their individual color coded icons. The icon rotates
every few seconds telling me how many emails sit in each account
I have programmed into my system. ePrompter even has a screen
saver that keeps tabs on my email accounts with the color coded
images that tell me how many emails are waiting for me to view
them in each account. Now I can sit in front of the television
and watch my favorite show and glance at the screen saver to
see if that important mail I have been waiting for has arrived.
ePrompter even has its very own notification sound which is
the equivalent of "You've Got Mail."
About the Author
Bill Platt. Among the services offered at http://IMIOBC.com ,
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