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

[Brian E Carpenter]

I just looked through a couple of papers written in 1987 by Denise Heagerty,
who ran the CERN mail gateway at that time. They mainly use "mail" and
in a few cases "electronic mail". If "email" had been in common use by
then, I think she'd have used it.

One of those papers cites Redell & White, "Interconnecting Electronic Mail
Systems", IEEE Computer, September 1983.  I'm on travel so can't easily check
whether they used "email".

The oldest RFC on my laptop disk that uses "email" (actually "EMail") is
RFC1123 (1989), and for "e-mail" (actually "E-Mail") it's RFC1724 (1994).
Somebody with a complete RFC corpus to hand could easily grep -i for earlier
occurrences.

Regards
   Brian Carpenter

On 25/07/2015 17:44, Larry Sheldon wrote:
> I predict that the origin will be hard to find--I have no cachet on the 
> matter, but it seems like AOL (which had a very brief dalliance with) 
> called it "mail", The WELL (and UUCP, and The Portal) called it mail, 
> Sperrylink called it mail (or "just messages"), at the University where 
> I worked through the '90s it was mail, I think.
> 
>