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

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Sat Jul 25 04:45:24 PDT 2015


    > From: Brian E Carpenter

    > I just looked through a couple of papers written in 1987 .. They mainly
    > use "mail" and in a few cases "electronic mail".

I'm pretty sure that "electronic mail" would have preceded "e-mail";
"electronic mail" is rather a lengthy mouthful, and I'm sure that it was
pretty inevitable that i) someone would shorten it to "e-mail", and ii) once
that had happened, it would spread pretty quickly.

"Electronic mail" is even more of a mouthful than the ARPANET/Internet
community's preferred "network mail", which is why I suspect that that
community stuck with "network mail" (and its shortened "net-mail") until
"e-mail" was pretty well standardized elsewhere.

	Noel



More information about the Internet-history mailing list