Email has been around for over 50 years. Back in 1971, what is widely regarded as the first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson as a test of an email feature on Arpanet. Since no one had told him what the historical event was, he just sent it to himself and the content was something like “QWERTYUIOP,” he said in an interview in the late 1990s. The protocol still used to send emails, smtp, has been around since 1981. The most common protocol for retrieving and managing email, imap, was introduced in 1988. The biggest technical changes since then are the addition of encrypted connections using ssl/t…