official definition

the first ever email was sent in 1971 through the ARPANET network. ARPANET was the first wide-area network that replaced the previous TCP/IP. this first email introduced the same systems we use now, with a personal username, the @ symbol, and the system afterwards. the simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) was implemented in 1983, and web and email clients became more popular in the 1990s, as personal computers became a common household item. with the widespread use of smartphones, emails became an easy way of staying in contact.

imo

i asked my parents if i could have an email account in the third grade when the rest of my friends started getting them. once i started using my email account, i exchanged it with my friends at school and dance on slips of paper. we came up with special nicknames to add to our email signatures for our correspondences, inspired by chat rooms (we were born to late to participate). we usually used our emails to send a lot of chain emails. we were young and gullible and thought we would be cursed if we didn’t sent it to twenty of our closest friends. i think it worked?

in review

one of my favorite ways to use my email was keep up with friends who lived in other countries. on trips with my parents, i would meet other girls my age, and exchanged emails to keep in touch. i would send actual mail to my friends in hong kong, but email was the faster way to communicate while physical envelopes were in transit. eventually, we all exchanged our instagram usernames, stopped emailing, and started keeping up on social media instead. this was the case with all my other friends as well. we only reserved emailing to evites and official sleepover plans.

emails stress me out

since elementary school, emails have mostly been used for academic and business purposes. i haven’t received a genuine casual email in years. now, an email usually requires professionalism, since it is the most formal way of communicating on the internet due to its long history. emails give me a lot of anxiety, and as i learned recently, produces a lot of carbon emissions. brands send mass emails with lots of images and graphics that sit in hundreds of people's inboxes unopened. so not only are emails personally stressful, but environmental as well. go figure.