Hi there,

The replies to the last email made me feel so happy. So many of you said BONUS. 

So, as promised: here’s one more story. 

And this one starts with a symbol you probably type every single day without ever thinking about it: @

1971. Two years before this series even starts

Remember episode 2 – the 1978 email that made $13 million and got its sender in trouble? That email needed an address to be sent to. And addresses needed a symbol nobody had thought to use yet.

That’s where Ray Tomlinson comes in.

Ray Tomlinson was working at BBN, helping build ARPANET – one of the early networks that eventually helped pave the way for the internet.

He wasn’t trying to invent email. He wasn’t working on some grand communication revolution. He was simply trying to solve a problem. He had one program that could leave messages for someone on the same computer. He had another that could send files between different computers.

And he thought: Why not make them work together?

There was just one problem. If a message was going from one computer to another, how would the system know who it was for?

He needed a way to separate the person’s name from the computer’s name. So he looked at his keyboard. And saw the symbol @.

It already meant “at.” It was sitting there, mostly ignored.

And, most importantly, nobody was likely to have it in their name. Perfect.

Problem solved.

And… That’s how we got: name@computer

QWERTYUIOP 🤔

The first email ever sent, between two machines sitting side by side in the same room, said something like “QWERTYUIOP.”

In fact, Ray Tomlinson later couldn’t even remember exactly what he’d typed. Basically a test message to see whether his idea worked.

He wasn’t trying to change how billions of people would communicate. He said it himself: he built it “mostly because it seemed like a neat idea.”

More than fifty years later, every single email address on Earth still uses his choice. Yours does. Mine does. Nobody’s ever needed a second opinion on it.

Here’s what got me, putting this whole series next to each other.

The 1978 email that started us off an accident of confidence from a guy who got yelled at by the Department of Defense.

The pop-up – a quick fix for one advertiser’s discomfort, in 1997.

The name “Google” – a typo nobody bothered to correct.

The unsubscribe button – a law nobody in the industry wanted.

And underneath all of it, the @ symbol – a two-minute decision by someone who wasn’t trying to build anything permanent.

Not one of these started with a plan to become essential. Every one of them was just someone solving the smallest possible version of the problem in front of them. And every single one of them outlasted the people who built them.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think most of the things we now consider “obviously the right way to do this” started exactly this small. Nobody sets out to build the default. They just fix the thing that’s actually broken, right now, in front of them and sometimes it sticks around for fifty years.

One more thing before I let you go…

I started this series the same way, honestly. I didn’t know if any of you would care about the history behind a popup or an unsubscribe button. Turns out you did more than I expected, judging by how many of you replied to nearly every single one of these.

So, thank you for that. Genuinely ♥️

And…

I’ve reached the end of the stories I had saved up… at least for now. But I don’t want to stop writing to you like this.

So I have three directions I’m thinking about:

1. Real customer stories: Actual people, actual problems, actual results without turning them into the usual polished case-study story.
2. What I got wrong: The mistakes I’ve made throughout my email marketing journey, what they taught me, and what I would do differently today. And some super fun tips that actually work. 
3. All about the product: I can show you five different things you can actually do with Icegram products that could make a surprisingly big difference, including things you may not even know the products can do.

Or tell me something completely different.

Just reply with 1, 2, or 3 or tell me what you’d like to read.

I’m genuinely open to your suggestions and I’d much rather build the next few months around what you actually want than guess. 

📌 P.S. If you’ve read this whole series even once, even from your phone at 11 PM or mid night… tell me, which episode was your favourite? 

Not necessarily the one you thought was the most interesting.

But the one that actually stuck with you.

Until next time,