195:. It started slowly: 10-20 cards a day were sent in the first weeks, 1000-2000 a day over the first summer, and then it gained momentum rapidly. During the 1995-96 Christmas season, there were days when over 19,000 cards were sent; by late spring of 1996 over 1.7 million cards had been sent in total. The source code for this service was made publicly available, with the stipulation that users share improvements with each other.
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167:, the technology behind the E-card has changed significantly. One technical aspect that remained mostly constant until 2019 was the delivery mechanism: the e-mail received by the recipient contains not the E-card itself, but an individually coded link back to the publisher's website that displays the sender's card.
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By mid-1996, a number of sites had developed E-cards. By mid-October 1996, directly emailable greeting cards and postcards ("Email
Express") were developed and introduced by Awesome Cards, based on new capabilities introduced in the Netscape 3.0 browser. This is the first time the E-card itself could
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Between Sep 1996 and
Thanksgiving 1997, a paper greeting card company named Blue Mountain developed E-cards on its website. Blue Mountain grew quickly by allowing visitors to create greetings for others to use. Blue Mountain further expanded when Microsoft promoted its service on its free Hotmail
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service. This affiliation ceased and Blue
Mountain sued Microsoft in Nov 1998 for putting email card announcements from it and other E-card companies in the junk folder of its Hotmail users.
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be emailed directly by the card sender to the recipient rather than having an announcement sent with a link to the card's location at the E-card site.
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instead of paper or other traditional materials. E-cards are available in many different mediums, usually on various
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won numerous awards, including a 1995 GNN Best of the Net award.
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sites. They can be sent to a recipient virtually, usually via
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179:metaphor was employed early in the life of the
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47:adding citations to reliable sources
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