Elwood Edwards, the man whose “You’ve got mail” recording defined an online generation, died Tuesday at age 74.
Edwards died from an unspecified long-term illness, according to Cleveland NBC affiliate WKYC, where he had worked for years. He passed away the day before he would have celebrated his 75th birthday.
Though Edwards was not a famous name or face, his voice was known to millions. In 1989, he recorded four short phrases for a then-small company called America Online. Those phrases included “Welcome,” “You’ve got mail,” “Files done” and “Goodbye.”
When the company, later known as AOL, became the most popular internet provider in the world, Edwards’ voice was heard millions of times each day.
“I had no idea it would become what it did, I don’t think anybody did,” Edwards said on a podcast in 2019.
Edwards got the opportunity because his wife, Karen, worked at Quantum Computer Services, a predecessor of AOL. When Karen overheard Quantum CEO Steve Case talking about adding a voice to an upcoming update, she volunteered her husband for the job. Edwards was paid $200 to record the phrases.
“Suddenly, AOL took off,” Edwards said on the “Silent Giants with Corey Cambridge” podcast. “I remember standing in line at CompUSA and seeing [stacks of AOL CDs] and thinking, ‘My voice is on every one of those, and nobody has a clue.’”
Edwards’ day job was working behind the scenes with local TV stations. A native of North Carolina, Edwards moved to Ohio in 1994 when he got a job at Akron station WVPX. He later moved to WKYC, where he worked for many years as a “graphics guru, camera operator and general jack-of-all-trades,” according to the station.
Over the years, Edwards made a few TV appearances to repeat his most famous phrase, including a 2015 stop on “The Tonight Show.”
“It never really went much past that,” he told Cleveland Magazine. “I think I became typecast.”
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