Email

Email, or electronic mail, is a method of transmitting and receiving digital messages using electronic devices over a computer network, conceived in the late twentieth century as a digital counterpart to postal mail. The first message sent over the ARPANET network in 1971 introduced the now familiar address syntax using the at sign to separate a user name from a system address, and the word email itself first appeared in print in June 1979, in the trade journal Electronics, describing the United States Postal Service's E-COM initiative. Email has since become a nearly universal communication medium, with an email address now treated as a basic and necessary part of business, commerce, government and everyday life in most countries.