[ih] Any suggestions for first uses of "e-mail" or "email"?

[Bill Ricker]

Back to the original topic, one of the editors at BoingBoing.net just
tweeted he still liked his year-ago post "Why I hate email" featuring a
(supposedly) c.1977 Honewell advert that leads with
 "Electronic Mail is a term that's been bandied about data processing
circles for years."
​​http://boingboing.net/2014/08/10/why-i-hate-email.html
​for which he cited as source a page only available now as
https://web.archive.org/web/20140305112636/http://www.retronaut.com/2014/02/heck-electronic-mail/
​which slugs it as «1977: “What the Heck is Electronic Mail?”»​

An amusing April 1 article is the earliest found in books.google.com from
Computerworld (aside from an OCR false positive)​ 3/30/1981 p.66
forecasting a federal trial grinding along in 4/1/1999 pitting US vs  UT&T
and MCM regarding monopolization of email. Pretty funny.


books.google must have a vast number of OCR false positives, as Ngram finds
'email' in the 19th century. "e-mail" inflects from background radiation of
false positives in the 1973-1975 period and flys 1976 forward.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/interactive_chart?content=e-mail%2C%22electronic+mail%22%2Cemail&year_start=1960&year_end=1980&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ce%20-%20mail%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2C%22%20electronic%20mail%20%22%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cemail%3B%2Cc0
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