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Technology|Elwood Edwards, Voice of AOL's 'You've Got Mail!' Alert,
Dies at 74
  
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/technology/
elwood-edwards-aol-dead.html

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Elwood Edwards, Voice of AOL's 'You've Got Mail!' Alert, Dies at 74

Early in the internet era, he was also behind other AOL messages,
including "Welcome!" "They said my voice was heard more than 35
million times a day," he once said.

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A man dressed in a polo shirt poses for a photograph while leaning on
a mailbox on a rural street.
Elwood Edwards was the voice of AOL's "You've Got Mail" alert, which
earned him mostly anonymous fame and a guest role on "The Simpsons."
Credit...Phil Long for The New York Times
Emmett Lindner

By Emmett Lindner

Published Nov. 7, 2024Updated Nov. 8, 2024, 12:43 p.m. ET

Elwood Edwards, an announcer who voiced the ubiquitous AOL email
alert "You've got mail!" at a time when many Americans were just
beginning to learn how to navigate the internet, died on Tuesday at
his home in New Bern, N.C. He was 74.

His daughter Sallie Edwards said the cause was complications of a
stroke.

In the 1990s, as computers began cropping up in home offices and
people were getting used to straining dial-up tones, AOL became
synonymous with nascent internet technology. Voicing the leap into
the new frontier was Mr. Edwards, whose familiar tones were heard in
cubicles, corner offices and living rooms throughout the country.

His "Welcome!" would greet users in the new online landscape and let
them know that this new thing called email awaited them at a time
when spam clutter was rare and dings, buzzes and push notifications
had not yet become entrenched in daily life.

"It started off as a test, just to see if it would catch on," Mr.
Edwards said in an interview with Great Big Story, a documentary
production company, in 2016. "At one point they said my voice was
heard more than 35 million times a day."

Elwood Hughes Edwards Jr. was born on Nov. 6, 1949, in Glen Burnie,
Md., to Elwood and Julia (Wheeler) Edwards. His father was in the
Army (he became one of the first members of the Ground Forces Band in
1946), and the family moved to Beaufort, N.C., and then to New Bern,
N.C., where Mr. Edwards attended high school and began what would be
a long career in broadcasting, starting in AM radio.

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