Batch #1 of E-mail GIFs from Grove

Below is a curious crop of e-mail GIFs (icons) found on sites in University of Florida's old personal web domain, Grove. This batch represents an hour or so of scrounging across the first four letters of Grove's alpha directory (1996).

What's most interesting to me re e-mail icons is the slavish adherence (then) to the letter/postal metaphor. Granted, "e-mail" is itself a metaphor (as dated as "instant message", given that "e-mail" is essentially instant), but an icon of a letter, or a GIF of a message being folded and inserted into an envelope is nothing if not "mailed" in. The iconography of e-mail has effectively disappeared from the working web, but little artifacts like these point to a time when the idea of e-mail was only as comfortable as the familiar imagery of a physical letter being folded, stuffed, and sent off through (physical) space.

 (custom design!)



 (representative of a demanding persona?)







(strict adherence to postal metaphor)



(one of the most common GIFs)



















 (not even the correct metaphor!)























 (serious attachment to the mail metaphor)







(playful, but somehow sinister)