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

[Bill Ricker]

Oops, accidentally replied off-list.  But that gives me opportunity to
expand my remarks ...


On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 11:26 AM, Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 10:48 AM, Ted Faber <faber at isi.edu> wrote:
>
>> This is completely anecdotal, but Mike Padlipsky never used the term
>> "e-mail" without adding "or netmail as we called it when we were
>> inventing it."  This was years after the fact, but he definitely
>> preferred the earlier term.
>>
>
> ​Absolutely he did.
>
> Thinking back to how i heard tales from MAP, I've inferred 'netmail' was
> like 'neted' in that it was intended to convey the interoperable
> multiplatform version of a tool of which you likely already had an
> idiosyncratic vendor-specific local-only version that guest users from
> other {institutions|nodes} wouldn't be expected to learn. 'Netmail' would
> initially have referred both to the protocol and the standard minimalist
> user client app.   The CLI user clients 'netmail' and 'neted' faded, but
> RFC-compliant 'netmail' formats and protocols won out.
>

​In fact, the success of 'neted' (RFC 569)  was inspiration for
'netmail'-the-client.

  In RFC 666 (the real one),  "Specification of the Unified User-Level
Protocol", November 1974​, MAP suggests the beginnings of
netmail-the-common-client as part of a common user CLI for ARPAnet nodes.
       https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc666
  In the rather long discussion of the proposed common 'mail' client,  it
is always 'mail'. It is not yet named 'netmail' (obviously coined later to
avoid conflicting with existing local, proprietary 'mail' commands).
​

​Mike's specific comments on murky history of 'e-mail' ​are preserved as
"And They Argued All Night..."
at http://www.multicians.org/allnight.html . (Wherein he suggests SMTP is
the mail that made it take off so John should get any specific credit for
getting it right.)

FYI the OED query ("appeal") was posted in ​October 2012 and discussed on
> this list in 2013.
> ​http://public.oed.com/appeals/email/​
>

​(Not criticizing.  It was re-posted it elsewhere as new (including on
Twitter, i think it was OED official post)​ so no surprise it showed up
here again. Just noting the prior thread's existence if anyone wanted to
check back.​

​http://mailman.postel.org/pipermail/internet-history/2013-June/002891.html
)​
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