This claim should raise one's eyebrows. The origin of email is well known, see Origin of Email. It was already an established technology in 1974 when I began sending email on the Arpanet, the Internet's predecessor.
To provide the context Faith can't remember properly:
Ayyadurai says all that stuff from RFC561 up to RFC 733 (where everything was tied together to have cc bcc reply-to and so on) was 'electronic messaging', but he wrote a program that mimicked an office mail system with inbox, outbox, sent mail folders (stored in a RDB rather than just files) coupled with a word processor for usability. I'm not sure if he was the first, but as a 14 year old it was certainly an impressive program - but it was only for a local network.
Here is a summary on his, modestly named website:
The Inventor of Email | History of Email
Ayyadurai may have also been the first to use the name 'email' to refer to the idea, but history of words like that is always a bit murky.
Edited by AdminModulous, : No reason given.
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