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 a message awaited them at a time when spam mail 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 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 Sr., who was in the Army, and Julia (Wheeler) Edwards. 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.
“He started out as a teenager before he was old enough to collect a paycheck,” Ms. Edwards said in an interview on Thursday. He began to work behind the scenes in television, too, at the local news station WCTI. He would occasionally go on camera to report the weather.
Mr. Edwards also began to voice commercials for businesses and organizations, including for a local church.
In the 1980s, his wife, Karen Edwards, worked as a customer service representative for Quantum Computer Services, which would become AOL. In 1989, she heard that the company was thinking of adding a voice-over to its software, and she suggested that Mr. Edwards be that voice.
He scribbled the announcements “Welcome! “You’ve got mail!” “File’s done” and “Goodbye” on a piece of paper and recorded them into a cassette deck in his living room.
His voice was a hit, and he was paid $200 for his recordings.
Those alerts, especially “You’ve got mail!” became indelible in the story of the internet even as AOL’s hold on the industry waned in later years. Mr. Edwards’s voice became so recognizable that it pushed him — albeit anonymously — into the national consciousness.
“You’ve Got Mail” was the title of the 1998 rom-com starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, a movie that viewed the internet through a lens of excitement, wonder and possibility. Mr. Edwards was asked to lend his voice to an episode of “The Simpsons” in 2000, as a virtual doctor giving a diagnosis (“You’ve got leprosy!”). And, in a commercial for Shopify, he appeared on camera to let a customer know, “You’ve got sales!”
He has been a clue on the game shows “Jeopardy!” and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” and appeared on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” in 2015 to recite his catchphrase (and a few others).
In addition to his daughter Sallie, he is survived by another daughter, Heather Edwards; a brother, Bill; and a granddaughter.
In 2016, Mr. Edwards retired after working for 14 years at 3News for the television station WKYC in Cleveland, where he was a “graphics guru, camera operator and general jack-of-all-trades,” according to an article by WKYC after his death.
That kind of work “has never been a job to me,” Mr. Edwards said on “Good Company Today,” a WKYC talk show. “It’s been an extension of my life.”
His reach extended well beyond local outlets and networks.
“Being associated with AOL has been gratifying,” he said on Great Big Story. “Even today, you go on aol.com, I greet you, I greet myself.”
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