His name was Elwood Edwards, but you probably only knew him as the voice that said, "Welcome! You've Got Mail!" on all those old AOL platforms from decades back.
The story of how Edwards, a jack-of-all-trades TV employee from WKYC-TV in Cleveland, came to be heard all over the world is amazing. He didn't seek the spotlight, but it accidentally found him when his wife - who worked at a computer company - heard that AOL was thinking of adding a greeting to its email program. She volunteered her husband.
"Edwards recorded the phrases on a cassette deck in his living room. Those four phrases – “Welcome,” “You’ve Got Mail,” “Files done,” and “Goodbye” – would eventually be heard by hundreds of millions of people and become a staple part of the AOL experience..."
“I had no idea it would become what it did, I don’t think anybody did,” Edwards said in a 2019 interview...“Suddenly, AOL took off… I remember standing in line at CompUSA and seeing (stacks of AOL CDs) and thinking, ‘my voice is on every one of those, and nobody has a clue.’"
The "mail' man was 74.
Elwood Edwards, voice of AOL’s iconic greeting ‘You’ve Got Mail,’ dies at 74