If fifteen years ago, not everyone had an email address, now some people can boast of having several, used for specific purposes. E-mail has become a mandatory attribute for registering on Internet resources, and in many companies, separate mailboxes with company domains are automatically created for employees. The ubiquitous use of email raises the question: how many addresses are there in the world?

Story

For the first time, an e-mail analog was invented in 1965 by employees of a technology institute from Massachusetts. The program was called “Mail” and allowed you to transfer messages between computers connected to the same mainframe. It was so convenient that the program quickly became popular within the organization.

After some time, it was decided to transfer the domain from the local computer to a dedicated server. This allowed you to send messages not only within the same local network, but also to computers that are not connected to it.

Very soon, usernames began to be stored on separate servers. Now the mail was in the cloud, which made it possible to read it from any computer.

For a long time, e-mail was used only for business purposes and was created by companies in the form of an independent network. But in 1996, the first paid Hotmail mailing service was opened.So people got the opportunity to register their own addresses and communicate with each other.

Interesting fact: With the opening of the Hotmail service, many believed that this would uproot Internet providers, as their services would no longer be needed. But contrary to expectations, the development of sites and other Internet content did not allow this to happen.

In 1997, the first free Yahoo! Mail, which made the exchange of letters as accessible as possible. Since then, the e-mail technology began to develop rapidly, in 1998 and 2000, Russian analogues began to work.

How many email addresses are there in the world?

Google conducted a study in which it found that every second person on the planet uses at least one mailing address. This allowed us to calculate the approximate number of active mail addresses, the number of which is in range from 4 to 5 billion. Also, over two decades, several billion inactive addresses that are not used have accumulated.

Given how tightly the Internet has come into our lives, there is no doubt that the total number of email addresses will only increase.

Can I use Cyrillic in an email address?

The introduction of Russian letters in the mail addresses is a rather complicated process, since most of the services for a long time supported the reception of letters sent only from e-mail in Latin.

However, in 2016, Google and Yandex announced the start of support for fully Russian-language addresses. Thus, it became possible to register Russian e-mails, for example, “user@russia.rf”.But the distribution of such addresses is complicated by the fact that other mail services do not support receiving letters from sources not written in Latin.

Now, most Internet users living in Russia still prefer to use English characters when registering mail.

Interesting fact: in the second half of 2016, 11 thousand Russian-language email addresses were registered, and since then their number has not increased significantly.