Elwood Edwards, voice of the ‘You’ve got mail’ AOL email greeting, dies at 74

Elwood Edwards, a media multihyphenate who voiced AOL’s iconic greeting “You’ve obtained mail,” has died.

Edwards died Tuesday at age 74 in New Bern, N.C., after an extended sickness, his former employer, Ohio NBC affiliate WKYC, confirmed. Based on the tv station, he died the day earlier than his seventy fifth birthday.

Throughout his decade-long stint at WKYC, Edwards labored as a “graphics guru, digicam operator, and common jack-of-all-trades,” the station mentioned, “but it was a considerably random alternative in 1989 that earned him worldwide fame.”

That yr, Edwards recorded the 4 brief phrases — together with “You’ve obtained mail” — that he had “a certain quantity of hassle making an attempt to flee” for the remainder of his life, he joked in 2012.

Thirty years in the past, Edwards’ spouse, Karen, was working as a customer support consultant at Quantum Pc Companies, AOL’s predecessor firm, when she overheard then-chief government Steve Case say he wanted a voiceover actor for a brand new undertaking.

“I had an thought. Why not make the service extra private by including the voice of an individual?” Case wrote in his 2016 e-book “The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Imaginative and prescient of the Future.” Karen Edwards promptly volunteered her husband’s companies.

“I’d by no means met him, and didn’t know what his voice gave the impression of. However I figured it will not less than be a very good prototype, a pattern we might play for different voiceover actors after we began auditions,” Case mentioned.

The manager scribbled just a few phrases — “Welcome,” “You’ve obtained mail,” “Information performed” and “Goodbye” — onto a Submit-it word and handed them to Karen, who promised recordings by the following day.

Edwards’ voice “couldn’t have been extra excellent,” Case recalled in his e-book. “It was disarmingly pleasant, just like the voice you’d count on from a stranger who supplied to hold your grandmother’s groceries. The second I heard it, I knew we weren’t going to be auditioning anybody else.”

Inside a month, AOL was mailing CDs to thousands and thousands of individuals nationwide, every containing upgraded software program and a message from Elwood Edwards — who was paid a mere $200 for the do-it-yourself recordings.

“I didn’t actually assume something of it on the time,” Edwards mentioned in a 2019 episode of the “Twenty Thousand Hertz” podcast. He had labored in broadcasting since highschool, so listening to his title come out of a speaker was “nothing new.”

“I don’t assume anybody had any thought what it will change into,” he mentioned.

Edwards went on to lend his voice to different tasks, together with promotions for the 1998 romantic comedy “You’ve Received Mail” and a 2000 episode of “The Simpsons.” In 2015, he appeared on “The Tonight Present Starring Jimmy Fallon,” and after he recited his signature phrase, Fallon instructed the viewers, “That’s definitely worth the value of admission, proper there. That’s sufficient.”

The previous broadcaster by no means acquired any residuals for his AOL voice work, he instructed Inside Version in 2016, two years after his retirement from WKYC. He wasn’t capable of finding a lot voiceover work after the gig both, he instructed Tradition Honey later that yr, as a result of he was “pigeonholed because the ‘You’ve obtained’ man, and nothing ever actually got here of that.”

Nonetheless, he mentioned on “Twenty Thousand Hertz,” being the voice of AOL was immensely gratifying, as was being acknowledged for it through the years.

“Our world is full of people that had been in the appropriate place on the proper time, and I’m glad to be a type of,” he mentioned.

Elwood Hughes Edwards Jr. was born on Nov. 6, 1949, in Glen Burnie, Md., and commenced his broadcasting profession in highschool in North Carolina.

“He began out as a teen, earlier than he was sufficiently old to gather a paycheck,” his daughter Sallie Edwards instructed the New York Instances on Thursday. He went on to work behind the scenes in tv, typically occurring digicam to report the climate. Later, he voiced commercials for companies and different organizations, together with an area church.

Along with his daughter Sallie, Edwards is survived by one other daughter, Heather Edwards; a brother, Invoice; and a granddaughter, the outlet reported.