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1971
The first message
Ray Tomlinson pings a message between two computers sitting side by side and reaches for a spare symbol to split the user from the machine. The @ gets the job — and a new life.
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1978
…and the first spam
Just seven years later, a marketer emails 400 people about a new computer. The inbox has been fighting for its dignity ever since. 🥴
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1982
SMTP & the smiley
RFC 821 gives email a common language — the protocol we still speak today. The same year, someone suggests typing :-) so people know you're joking. Foundational work, both.
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1996
Email escapes to the web
Webmail arrives and your inbox follows you to any browser on Earth. No client to install, no excuses left not to reply.
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2004
A gigabyte, for free
Free mailboxes balloon from a few megabytes to a whole gigabyte, launched on April 1st. Everyone assumed it was a joke. It wasn't.
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2007
Mail learns to sign
DKIM lets a domain cryptographically sign its mail, so receivers can tell the real sender from an impostor. The long war on forgery gets serious.
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2012
Enter mailwhere ✨
A full email-delivery platform — analytics, subscriber segmentation, dedicated IP pools and a delivery API — built to read behaviour and intent and tell who was genuinely interested.
It carried a bit of everything: franchise chains blasting local promotions, casting calls chasing down actors for auditions, and the quiet transactional mail every app leans on — sign-up confirmations, password resets, order receipts. If it had to reach an inbox, mailwhere sent it.
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2014
DMARC draws the line
SPF and DKIM grow up into DMARC: domains finally get to say "here's how to treat mail that fails my checks." Phishers grumble.
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Mar
2015Curtain call 🎬
In March 2015 the adventure wound down. A run of search-engine algorithm changes reshaped the advertising world many of mailwhere's customers lived in — and Mimecast came knocking with a career in email security.
So the platform was retired, and its founder went off to spend the next decade making email safer, not just faster.
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2018
Encryption, enforced
MTA-STS and TLS-RPT push mail servers to actually use the encryption they advertise — and to report back when they can't. Quietly important stuff.
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Today
Email, tested properly
Fifty-odd years on, email still runs the world — and still breaks in fascinating ways. These days that's what Vlad builds tools for.
mailwhere
Once an email delivery platform · now a fond little museum
A short history of the @
Mailwhere spent its days turning subscribers into customers by reading the room — opens, clicks, intent. It's resting now. So instead, here's the story of the thing it lived and breathed: email.
Take the tourmailwhere is parked, but the person behind it kept going.