Elwood Edwards, Voice of AOL’s ‘You’ve Got Mail!’ Alert, Dies at 74

Elwood Edwards, an announcer who voiced the ubiquitous AOL email alert “You’ve got mail!” at a time when many Americans were just beginning to learn how to navigate the internet, died on Tuesday at his home in New Bern, N.C. He was 74.

His daughter Sallie Edwards said the cause was complications of a stroke.

In the 1990s, as computers began cropping up in home offices and people were getting used to straining dial-up tones, AOL became synonymous with nascent internet technology. Voicing the leap into the new frontier was Mr. Edwards, whose familiar tones were heard in cubicles, corner offices and living rooms throughout the country.

His “Welcome!” would greet users in the new online landscape and let them know that this new thing called email awaited them at a time when spam clutter was rare and dings, buzzes and push notifications had not yet become entrenched in daily life.

“It started off as a test, just to see if it would catch on,” Mr. Edwards said in an interview with Great Big Story, a documentary company, in 2016. “At one point they said my voice was heard more than 35 million times a day.”

Elwood Hughes Edwards Jr. was born on Nov. 6, 1949, in Glen Burnie, Md., to Elwood Sr., who was in the Army, and Julia (Wheeler) Edwards. The family moved to Beaufort, N.C., and then to New Bern, N.C., where Mr. Edwards attended high school and began what would be a long career in broadcasting, starting in AM radio.