The Email Is 40!

According to Pingdom’s figures, there’s about 300 billion emails exchanged every day. Which means a lot of regular e-mail users are handling hundreds of e-mails a day. This may include subscriptions to mailing-lists, professional e-mail, private e-mails as well as a lot of junk e-mail. In fact, according to the same Pingdom report, 90% of these 300 billion e-mails are considered as spam.

How e-mail has evolved

Although we now take e-mail for granted, it’s good to take a trip down memory lane and see how e-mail has evolved. E-mail (or at least the form it is known, with the ‘@’ sign) was introduced by a U.S Engineer, Ray Tomlinson forty years ago. It was conceived to be a communication tool to be used at the DARPA. It had a slow adoption for the first 20 years of its existence; e-mail was only used in military environment. The first commercial offer for e-mail appeared almost 20 years later as the Internet received public adoption.

Initially, Internet Service Providers would assign e-mail addresses to their clients, but then came those free e-mail services like Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail (who was actually a late comer in that field).
By its nature, e-mail has become a platform of choice for sending/receiving unsolicited bulk e-mail (also known as SPAM). This has led to a lot of progress in the anti-spam applications. While those solutions aren’t perfect yet, they have contributed to filtering a lot of Spam e-mails thereby keeping e-mail as a great tool to communicate.

Then along came mobile phone adoption: people wanted to be able to use their e-mails on the go. This has led to a lot of developments and changes in the backend of any e-mail system as the urgent need to synchronize e-mail from multiple devices has arisen. But yet, the e-mail system kept on going strong and still held it’s position as one of the most used communication tools around.

However – in the last few years we have witnessed the social media invasion: people often communicate through these social media channels. While most of these social media tools have a private messaging system, e-mail still plays a major role as it is used either for identifying ourselves, or as a tool for receiving notifications on what’s happening in this world and the world of social media.
As we can see, e-mail has been through tough challenges, but has kept strong and found a way to adapt to the ever-changing and challenging situations.

How does a Hosted Exchange fit in?

For the current business e-mail user, it is key to rely on an e-mail system that can guarantee to keep pace with that ever-changing e-mail environment. The great thing about Hosted Exchange is that it already comes bundled with all the features that address the issues aforementioned.
A hosted Exchange solution comes with the following features:
Integrated spam filter: this is an intelligent spam filter that learns and adapts from your e-mail usage behavior;
Mobile friendly: despite the different mobile technologies that exist, you’re sure to find a fit that goes with a Hosted Exchange solution;
Integrates with social media: apart from the usual interaction between e-mail and social media, a Hosted Exchange solution can even integrate with your IM and social media tools so that you know when your social media connections are online allowing you to interact with them.

By: Nick J Davies

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Hosted Exchange 2010 is a business grade, cloud-based email service available from Giacom World Networks. Share email, calendars, contacts and tasks with Hosted Exchange.