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.












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