You wouldn’t recognize him or his name, but you definitely knew the voice.
Elwood Edwards, the man who voiced the iconic “You’ve got mail” greeting for AOL in the early days of the internet, a catchphrase that went on to secure his place as a pop culture sensation and title of a movie starring Tom Hanks, died Tuesday at his home in North Carolina.
Edwards was 74.
Edward’s voicing the words, “Welcome,” “Files done,” “You’ve got mail,” and “Goodbye,” became as well known and ubiquitous as the infamous whirring and beeping sounds of AOL’s dial-up tone when people connected their computers to the internet in the 1990s.
He said at one point his voice was heard 35 million times a day.
An announcer who had a long career in radio and television, Edwards got his break in 1989 when his wife, Karen Edwards, working at Quantum Computer Services, which went on to become AOL, learned that the company was looking for a person to do voiceover for its software.
She suggested her husband, who recorded the phrases on a cassette tape in his living room. He was paid $200.
“I had no idea it would become what it did, I don’t think anybody did,” Edwards said in a 2019 interview on the “Silent Giants with Corey Cambridge” podcast.
Over the years, due to his notoriety for “You’ve got mail,” Edwards appeared on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” in 2015, made a commercial for Shopify, in which he announced “You’ve got sales,” and lent his voice to an episode of “The Simpsons” in 2000.
Hanks and Meg Ryan starred in a 1998 romantic comedy with the title “You’ve Got Mail.”
“He would still blush anytime someone brought it up,” his daughter, Heather Edwards said, the Associated Press reported. “He loved the attention, but he never got used it.”
