Elwood Edwards.
Photo: AOL via YouTube
Elwood Edwards, the live booth announcer and voice actor behind AOL.com’s “You’ve got mail” alert, died at his New Bern, North Carolina, home on November 5. He was 74. He is survived by his daughter Heather Edwards, brother Bill, and a granddaughter, as well as another daughter, Sallie Edwards, who told the New York Times that complications from a stroke were the cause of his death. In 1989, Edwards’s wife, Karen, a customer-service agent at Quantum Computer Services (later AOL), overheard from the company’s CEO Steve Case that he wanted to add a voice feature to the new Q-Link service. She recommended her husband, who provided four phrases, one of which would enter the cultural lexicon and become one of the defining catchphrases of the 1990s internet boom: “Welcome,” “File’s done,” “Good-bye,” and “You’ve got mail!” He recorded these sentences on a cassette deck from the comfort of his own living room. He was paid $200 for them.
Born in Glen Burnie, Maryland, in 1949, Edwards began his broadcast career while in high school. He worked in AM radio before transitioning to behind-the-scenes work in television. He was on-camera sporadically throughout his career as a reporter, weatherman, and commercial actor. He would lend his instantly recognizable voice to a cameo on The Simpsons (“You’ve got leprosy,” his virtual doctor character tells Homer and Bart in the season 11 episode “Little Big Mom”), and he appeared in a segment on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2015 to recite his famous phrase as well as some others (“Uptown Funk,” “Adele Dazeem,” and “Dat ass tho”). In 2016, Edwards retired from his role as a “graphics guru, camera operator, and general jack-of-all-trades” at the 3News channel of Cleveland’s WKYC television station. Around this time, Edwards appeared in the documentary series Great Big Story, in which he said that at one point AOL had told him his voice was heard over 35 million times a day. “Even today, you go on AOL.com,” he said. “I greet you. I greet myself.”
