Elwood Edwards, voice of AOL's 'you've got mail' alert, has died

https://archive.ph/bxiFP

For a while it was possible to pay Elwood Edwards to record a short message (https://web.archive.org/web/20080613203307/http://www.makinw...). In 2002, I had him record "Mail classified by POPFile" for my POPFile machine learning email classifier (https://getpopfile.org).

You can listen to it here: https://soundcloud.com/john-graham-cumming/mail-classified-b...

I paid $30 for that. And him saying "Use the source, Luke!"

He was paid piecemeal for the recordings.

He drove for Uber later in life. Here's a video on it from Inside Edition:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sN67w6y1uig

When I was a kid, using AOL with all my friends, I spent a few hours in Soundforge editing a clip of me saying "worms" as close to the AOL tone as possible. I did it pretty convincingly and began distributing the "You've got worms!" notification everywhere I could.

Anyone under 100 will probably think this was really stupid, but it was amusing to me - and all the other silly hacks on windows and such.

love that The Simpsons actually tracked him down to do the "You've Got Leprosy" line. Dedication to the authenticity.

We used the same voice in GE's BusinessTalk system. I think BT and AOL shared a codebase. Not sure which was first.

In case you just want to hear it: https://www.myinstants.com/en/instant/youve-got-mail/

The Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast had a episode featuring Mr. Edwards: https://www.20k.org/episodes/youvegotmail

When emails were infrequent enough that you’d only hear this a few times per day. I feel like setting it up now just to see how irritating it is. RIP EE.

Goodbye!

If I'm running a command in the background, and want to be notified when it's done, I usually run it like

  cmd; say 'files done' 

Sadly the Fastmail app wouldn’t let me set a custom notification sound but a few weeks ago I switched a frequent text contact sound to his “You’ve got mail”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwood_Edwards

If the early internet had a voice it was definitely his, "You got mail!" is iconic.

I'm a sad panda hearing that he passed. Rest in peace, and thank you.

I always assumed that voice was one of those fake UI they do in the movies, in the movie "You've got mail".

Only made $200 for his voice recordings.

A final "{S goodbye"

Good-Bye

Goodbye!

[dead]