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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The guy who claims he invented E-Mail is slowly rewriting history one lawsuit at a time. The wannabe politician, whom many would call a charlatan, using the money from the Gawker case has turned his sights on Techdirt in an effort to squelch historical facts about the origins of e-mail. While this SLAPP suit may look for now on the surface like it is aimed at a single site, Techdirt, regarding a single topic, e-mail, the long term goal might be to take all journalism down a notch or two.

The five-page story on Ars Technica is a deep dive into the history — RFCs, major programs, interviews, etc. They even had an interview with Shiva Ayyadurai. Here's an extract from the intro:

Ayyadurai did write a program called "EMAIL" for use by the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (now a part of Rutgers). He copyrighted the code in 1982. But Ayyadurai today makes the far more significant claim that he invented "the electronic mail system as we know it today," even though his code had little impact beyond the university. Mainstream tech history books don't even mention Ayyadurai—unless you count the several books Ayyadurai has written about himself.

On the ARPAnet, the predecessor to the Internet, electronic mail conventions were well-established by the mid-1970s. Dave Crocker, one of a group of ARPAnet pioneers despised by Ayyadurai, told Ars that he wasn't just using e-mail by 1974—he was positively addicted to it, a full three decades before the smartphone.

And another snippet, from their interview with Ayyadurai:

As we persisted in asking what was somehow un-e-mail-like about older 1970s technologies, like the Xerox Alto—Ayyadurai grew more agitated.

"Let's stop right there," he said. "Let's stop. They didn't call it 'e-mail.' You see, you guys want to separate the term. That's wrong, okay? That's wrong. This is what's been going on, Joe, for four fucking years.

"According to Wikipedia, e-mail is the exchange of digital messages," he continued. "Right? Is that a right definition? It is a fucking wrong definition! E-mail is not the exchange of digital messages. That would make Facebook e-mail, it would make every fucking thing e-mail! If you want to talk to the expert—which is me—there are three types of messaging. There's short messaging, which goes back all the way to the smoke signal. Okay? There's community messaging, and there's formal messaging."

So if someone was sending a text document electronically, we asked, from one person to another, on a networked computer—why didn't that count as e-mail?

"Did they call it 'e-mail'?" he said. "No. I defined e-mail! And you guys have got to give me that credit."

Vint Cerf, who is a co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol that underpins the Internet itself, told us there's "no evidence that Ayyadurai's work had any impact on the development of electronic messages that stem from early ARPAnet work." We asked Ayyadurai about this quote.

"What does Vint Cerf know?" demanded Ayyadurai. "I know Vint Cerf. They created their Internet Hall of Fame seven days after I went in the Smithsonian. Are you aware of that? These guys want to re-write their history."

Seriously, as much as it goes against tradition here, the entire article is well-worth reading. Are there any graybeards and/or former mail admins or even long ago users who wish to chime in with their experiences with e-mail in the pre/post August 1982 time frame?

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