The World's First Email? Ray Tomlinson, the @ Sign and the Debate
Ask who sent the first email and you will get different answers, because it depends on what you mean by email. A message left for another user on the same computer? A message sent across a network to a different computer? Or the full system of inboxes, folders and replies we use today? Each has a different "first".
Candidate one: mail on a single computer (1965)
The earliest widely recognised electronic mailbox was the MAIL command on MIT's Compatible Time-Sharing System, written in 1965. Users of the same machine could leave messages in each other's mailbox files and be told about them at login. It had senders, recipients and stored messages, but every user had to be on the same computer. Our article on computer messaging before email covers this period.
Candidate two: networked email (1971)
The event most often called the first email happened in late 1971 at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which built key parts of the ARPANET. Ray Tomlinson, an engineer there, was working with SNDMSG, a program for leaving messages on the TENEX operating system, and CPYNET, an experimental program for copying files between computers over the network.
His insight was that delivering a message is just adding text to the end of a mailbox file, and a file-transfer program could do that on a remote computer. He modified SNDMSG to use CPYNET's method, and sent a test message between two computers that sat side by side in the same room but were connected only through the ARPANET.
Tomlinson later said he did not remember what the first message said, only that it was forgettable test text, probably something like "QWERTYUIOP". He also joked that he had shown it to a colleague with the warning not to tell anyone, because it was not what they were supposed to be working on.
Why the @ sign?
Networked mail needed a way to say both who and which computer. Tomlinson looked at the keyboard of his Model 33 Teletype for a character that would never appear in a person's name and that read naturally: user at host. The @ sign fitted perfectly, and user@host became the pattern that every email address still follows. The computer name was later replaced by a domain name, but the idea is unchanged.
Candidate three: the modern email program (1978 and a dispute)
Through the 1970s, ARPANET mail grew quickly and gained features such as reply, forward, subject lines and dates. In 1978 a teenager in New Jersey, V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai, wrote an electronic mail program called EMAIL for a medical college and in 1982 registered a copyright for it. He has since claimed to be the inventor of email. Historians of computing and many of the ARPANET pioneers reject that claim, because networked email with inboxes, addresses and message headers was already in wide use by the time his program was written. A copyright covers a particular piece of software, not the invention of an idea.
What most historians conclude
- Electronic mail between users of one computer dates to at least 1965.
- Email between different computers over a network, and the
user@hostaddress, date to Ray Tomlinson's work in 1971. - Email as a standard for the whole internet arrived in 1982, when SMTP (RFC 821) and the message format (RFC 822) were published.
So the fair answer to "who sent the first email" is: Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email in 1971, building on mailbox systems that already existed on single computers.
A few other firsts
- 1976: Queen Elizabeth II sent an email over the ARPANET during a visit to a British defence research establishment, one of the first heads of state to do so.
- 1978: Gary Thuerk of Digital Equipment Corporation sent an advertisement to hundreds of ARPANET users at once, now remembered as the first spam. It was not well received.
- 1982: SMTP is standardised, and the email system we use today begins to take shape.
Spam arrived just seven years after email itself, and it has been with us ever since. Keeping your real address away from sites that will add it to lists is exactly what EmailVanish is for. For how today's email works under the hood, see How Email Works.