📼 AOL paid him $200

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⚡ TL;DR

📖 Read time: 3 minutes

You’ve heard him hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. You’d recognize his voice in a second. You probably never knew his name.

Elwood Edwards. The “You’ve Got Mail” guy. The voice every American who logged on in the ’90s heard before checking their email, their pictures, their voicemail.

He was paid $200 total. (Yes, you read that right.)

Here’s how it happened. In 1989, his wife, Karen, worked customer service at a tiny Virginia startup called Quantum Computer Services. (You know it now as AOL.) One day, she overheard the CEO, Steve Case, saying he wanted a voice for the company’s new software. Something friendly and warm.

Karen raised her hand. “My husband does voice work.”

Elwood recorded four phrases on a cassette deck in their living room, handed in the tape and got paid $200 (about $520 in today’s money). The phrases? “Welcome.” “You’ve Got Mail.” “File’s done.” “Goodbye.”

That was it. No royalties. No residuals. No “we’ll cut you in if this gets big.”

Within a few years, his voice was being heard up to 35 million times a day. He told an interviewer he’d stand in line at CompUSA, look at a wall of AOL CDs stacked floor to ceiling and think, “My voice is on every one of those. And nobody has a clue.”

After Elwood retired from his TV job in 2016, he drove for Uber. 

Passengers would slide into the back seat, hear his voice and absolutely lose it. The man who announced the dawn of the internet was driving strangers home from dinner for $14 a ride. 

He died in November 2024 in New Bern, North Carolina. The day before his 75th birthday.

That’s the most internet story ever told. If you want to see Elwood tell his story, here’s a short video on YouTube. It’s wonderful!

🗣️ TEXT/POST THIS STAT: AOL paid Elwood Edwards $200 to record “You’ve Got Mail” in his living room in 1989. His voice was heard 35 million times a day at AOL’s peak. After retirement, he drove Uber. He passed in November 2024, the day before his 75th birthday. Forward this to anyone who remembers dial-up. Free playbook at GetKim.com.

📩 Send this to someone who still hears “You’ve Got Mail” in their head every time they open an inbox. (You know who.) Use the handy dandy icons below.

A $195,000 bank robbery with no leads was solved after police pulled Google location data from every phone close to the scene. It led them to a suspect and conviction. The Supreme Court is deciding if that kind of search should exist at all.

📺 Geofence warrant catches bank robber →

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🐛 What’s app, Doc: Meta patched two nasty WhatsApp bugs, and you need to update right now. One lets a poisoned Reel preview pull stuff from a hacker’s server onto your phone, opening the door to spyware, phishing redirects and account takeovers. The other hits WhatsApp Desktop on Windows, where a PDF runs as a program. That’s password-stealing malware or ransomware in disguise. No active attacks yet, but 3 billion users is one loud dinner bell. Update every device today. 

Apple opens wallet: Cupertino is spending like Siri just discovered how to read its own reviews. Apple’s R&D tab crossed $11 billion last quarter, eating about 10 cents of every revenue dollar, breaking Apple’s 30-year habit of more conservative R&D spending. About time. I’m excited to see what they come up with. It’s Siri-ously overdue.

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Paperback boyfriend comeback: The sexiest accessory in New York is apparently not having the accessory. Single women are into Luddite boyfriends, guys who skip smartphones, social media and the little dopamine casino in every pocket. The diner paperback guy, once mistaken for either unemployed or someone’s uncle, is now aspirational. That’s what years of swiping did to us. Basic attention has become a luxury. The new peacocking is turning push notifications off.

👻 Followers, where art thou? Instagram purged its bot accounts, and the carnage is wild. Kylie Jenner: down millions. Cristiano Ronaldo: down a chunk of his 700 million-strong following. Virat Kohli, Priyanka Chopra, both bleeding numbers overnight. Turns out a lot of “fans” were Russian click farms and AI accounts. I lost two followers. Influence has become Insta-graham crackers.

Holy hold music: So Pope Leo XIV called his Chicago bank’s customer service line. They hung up on him, multiple times. The actual pope. The rep flatly didn’t believe it was him, even after he identified himself, so he tried again and got disconnected again. That’s so funny to me. Somewhere in Chicago, a banker sent the pope to voicemail and clocked out at 5. Why did the banker eat lunch alone? He was a loaner. (Ouch.)

There is $70 billion in unclaimed money sitting in state treasuries right now. AI can help you claim what’s yours in under five minutes.

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Mute one noisy app: Don’t silence your whole computer because one app is distracting you. On Windows, go to Settings > System > Notifications, scroll to the app and toggle it off. On Mac, open System Settings > Notifications, select the app under Application Notifications and switch it off. Work messages still come through. Meme spam can wait. Sunday, I’ll show you how to shut down all notifications on your phone, too.

📱 Tap the back shortcut: Your phone has buttons you can’t see. On iPhone, open Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap and choose what a double or triple tap does, like taking a screenshot, turning on the flashlight or opening an app. On Android, go to Settings > System > Gestures > Quick Tap and pick your action. FYI, some models don’t have it.

Kill the soap opera effect: If movies look weirdly smooth or realistic, blame motion smoothing. It’s useful for live sports but makes films and shows look cheap. To turn it off, open Settings > Picture > Motion. Some brands use different names, like Auto Motion Plus on Samsung, TruMotion on LG or Motionflow on Sony. And here you thought it was the 4K resolution.

⭐️ Get their attention fast: Company ignoring you or dragging out a refund? Leave a Google review first. Find their business page, click Write a review and explain what happened. Funny how quickly “we’ll look into it” appears in your inbox. Next step: File a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. They’ll contact the business for a public response. If the company ignores it, it can hurt their rating and potential customers see it, too.

South Korea gave a humanoid robot a Buddhist refuge ceremony, which means we officially live in the timeline where even machines are searching for inner peace. 

The robot, named Gabi, stood 4-foot-3 at Seoul’s Jogye Temple, bowed to monks, accepted a string of 108 prayer beads and promised to follow five robot-friendly Buddhist precepts, including “don’t harm humans” and “don’t overcharge.” 

Which honestly sounds less like Buddhism and more like OpenAI before it became a for-profit company.

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🔜 Tomorrow: Your face is becoming your boarding pass at airports across the country, but you don’t have to let TSA scan it. I’ll tell you the words to say before your next flight.

Tomorrow’s trivia: The thing almost everyone does to “speed up” their phone might not be the hack you think it is.

🪫 The answer: D) Around 60%. The sweet spot is 30% to 60%, so option C would technically work, too. Storing a battery at 100% creates “voltage stress” that wears out the chemistry faster, while storing it at 0% puts it at risk of “deep discharge,” which can brick the battery entirely.

Pro tip: Most modern e-bikes (like those with Bosch or Shimano systems) have a storage mode you can trigger in their apps. If yours doesn’t, aim for three bars out of five on your display. 

Also, keep it out of the heat. Storing a battery in a 95°F garage will degrade it twice as fast as keeping it in a climate-controlled room. Why did the battery end up in court? It got charged. Ba-dum-tss!

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, ZOFGENOW, Korea JoongAng Daily

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