Email is a system designed to be the electronic replica of the many features and functions of the interoffice (inter-organizational) mail system that used paper documents to enable collaboration, cooperation and communication among users of differing expertise within the business office environment. The interoffice mail system consisted of multiple, linked and cooperating systems and processes including:

Email is not the simple exchange of text messages. The simple transfer of text messages, using electronic or electrical devices, beginning with the invention of the Morse code telegraph of the mid 1800s, were referred to by various names including “electric mail,” “electronic mail,” and “electronic messaging” to broadly refer to the “electronification” of text messages. Other such examples included exchange of text messages using the 1939 IBM radio-type; or ARPANET messaging, using the familiar “@” sign, for primitive electronic communications between computers. But, this is not “email” --- the electronic system for emulating the entire interoffice (inter-organizational) mail system --- the system we all know and use today.

Electronic messaging researchers had thought it impossible to create email. For example, in December of 1977, a few months before Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai invented email, David Crocker, an "internet pioneer" in electronic messaging, stated in the detailed Introduction of a seminal RAND Corporation Report that summarized the state-of-the-art research in electronic messaging at the time:

These statements reflect the limited scope of the efforts of these "internet pioneers," who were narrowly focused on rudimentary text messaging systems and were proposing minor modifications to expand that rudimentary functionality. The Background section of the Introduction begins by providing the historical context of such rudimentary text messaging systems:

The Background expands by providing a summary of those rudimentary text-messaging systems and proposes some ideas on expanding the feature set. In the Operational Model section of the Introduction, basic observations of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system are provided, demonstrating knowledge of its existence. However, and most importantly, the notion of creating an electronic version of this interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, within the critical "Scope of Specification and Implementation," section of the Introduction (pp. 7-10), unequivocally states, that such a development is not within the scope of their efforts.

In February 2012 when Dr. Ayyadurai was honored by the Smithsonian, ironically, it was Crocker who was a leader in the defamation campaign to attack Dr. Ayyadurai's work and reputation. When the above Report was discovered and exposed, clearly showing that neither Crocker nor his ARPANET colleagues had any intention to create email, the electronic replica of the interoffice mail system, Crocker contacted Dr. Leslie P. Michelson, likely believing he could soften the expose' of Crocker's historical revisionism. However, Dr. Michelson elected not to speak with him given the damage that Crocker had already done to Dr. Ayyadurai's reputation.

The factual record also shows that the ARPANET information brochure of 1978, and even the one of 1986 (eight years later), makes no reference to the word "email," "e-mail" or "Electronic Mail," neither in the body of the brochure nor in the index of their brochure.

What is absolutely false is to claim that the ARPANET invented email and the "@" is equivalent to email.

In 1978, Shiva Ayyadurai did not think it "impossible" to create a full-scale electronic replica of the inter-organizational paper-based mail system. With a singular intention to create such a system, he succeeded in doing what "internet pioneers" had not only thought impossible but also had no interest in pursuing. He wrote nearly 50,000 lines of code, across an interconnected system of nearly 35 software programs to create the first full-scale electronic replica of the interoffice paper-based mail system that ran across a multi-campus network. The system was technologically decades ahead of its time in using distributed databases, full administrative and management capabilities, with fault detection and resolution --- features necessary for real world use. It was a full-scale production implementation, used by hundreds, and was commercialized --- people were charged and paid to use the system. In summary, it was a success.

He named this system, "EMAIL," a term never used before in the English language. At the time of email's invention, neither copyright law nor patent law existed for protecting software inventions. In 1980, the United States government passed the Computer Software Act of 1980, which amended the Copyright Act of 1976, to protect software inventions through Copyright. In 1981, Dr. Ayyadurai won a prestigious Westinghouse Science Honors Award for his invention of email. In the same year, he applied for a Copyright to protect the invention.

On August 30, 1982, the United States government issued the first U.S. Copyright for "Email," to Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, legally recognizing him as the inventor of email. Three important and indisputable facts, therefore, stand without question: (1) He was the first to create a full-scale electronic replica of the interoffice mail system; (2) He was the first to name this system "email;" and, (3) He received the first U.S. Copyright for "Email," officially recognizing him as the inventor of email.

It was not until 1994 that the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that computer programs were patentable as the equivalent of a "digital machine." Therefore, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai being issued the first Copyright for email in 1982 is of immense historical and legal significance, that cannot be trivialized.

Stephen Y. Chow, one of the world's leading legal experts on intellectual property law, has stated with clarity the importance and historical relevance of the issuance of the Copyright to the teenage inventor:

Ray Tomlinson modified a pre-existing program called SNDMSG. SNDMSG was not created by Tomlinson. Even before Tomlinson's modification to SNDMSG, SNDMSG allowed a user connected to a local computer to append text to an electronic file located on that same local computer. Tomlinson's modification to SNDMSG involved copying code from another pre-existing program called CPYNET into the SNDMSG program. CPYNET was a file transfer protocol, which Tomlinson also did not create. Tomlinson's modification allowed a user connected on a local computer to append text to an electronic file located on a remote computer.

This modified version of SNDMSG, like the original SNDMSG, still required the user to have knowledge of cryptic commands, mainly accessible to highly trained technical people, to achieve even this modest result. John Vittal, one of Tomlinson's contemporaries and another "internet pioneer," unequivocally described these early simple systems as rudimentary and incomplete:

At best, what Tomlinson "invented," was a "caveman Reddit." Tomlinson, by his own admission, said his modification was a "no brainer." Fourteen-year-old Shiva Ayyadurai, in contrast, wrote 50,000 lines of original software code that implemented numerous features and functions to replicate the entire interoffice mail system, with a very easy-to-use-interface enabling anyone to use the system. This is email --- the email we all know and experience today.

This is not to say that someone else would not have created email, given the march of technology history to integrate computing with office automation. However, the fact remains, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai was the first to do it. The conflation of Tomlinson's modification to SNDMSG as "email," is a deliberate marketing campaign to enhance the brand value and reputation of Tomlinson's employer, Raytheon/BBN, in the lucrative cybersecurity market (see below).

After inventing email in 1978, Shiva Ayyadurai sought neither recognition nor financial gain for his invention of email. He went on to receive four degrees at MIT in engineering, design and biology. In the midst of his PhD at MIT in 1993, he created EchoMail, a revolutionary artificial intelligence (A.I.) technology that automatically reads, classifies, routes and responds to incoming email --- an innovation that became commercialized after winning an industry-wide competition to classify President Clinton's email messages for the U.S. White House. EchoMail grew to $250 million in value and served the largest Fortune 1000 companies such as Nike, American Express, Unilever and major institutions such as the U.S. Senate

EchoMail won nearly every major industry award for email management including the Best Messaging Solution Award from IBM in 1997. In 2000, the front-page article of the eminent MIT Technology Review featured Shiva Ayyadurai as "Dr. Email" and shared the many commercial successes of EchoMail. In 2001, The Wall Street Journal highlighted the power of how "EchoMail Can Sort, Answer Deluge of Emails." In 2002, EchoMail received the highest industry rating from Forrester Research for email marketing technology. Today, EchoMail focuses on small businesses to enable them to use the same powerful A.I. technology for intelligent email management in customer service, sales and marketing.

In 2011, Doug Aamoth, the Technology Editor of Time Magazine, after reviewing the artifacts of Dr. Ayyadurai's 1978 invention, wrote a feature story, "The Man Who Invented Email," sharing the facts of email's invention. In 2012, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) commissioned Dr. Ayyadurai and awarded "The Email Lab," his research group at the International Center for Integrative Systems, two grants totaling nearly $100,000 to develop innovative solutions for saving the ailing USPS using email technology. The two reports were delivered to the USPS leadership's Office of the Inspector General.

That same year, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (NMAH) honored Dr. Ayyadurai by receiving his artifacts documenting his 1978 invention of email. In 2013, Norton and Penguin published his book The Email Revolution. In 2014, The Wall Street Journal commissioned and published Dr. Ayyadurai's essay on "The Future of Email" for their 125th Anniversary issue. More recently, during the 2016 Presidential elections, The New York Times, referring to Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai as the "email pioneer," sought and published his expert commentary on Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. In 2017, his new book The Future of Email will be hitting the bookstands globally.

He continues to innovate across the fields of medicine and health. His latest invention CytoSolve, a technology platform for eliminating animal testing and accelerating drug development, has been used to discover a new combination therapeutic for pancreatic cancer, gaining FDA allowance to proceed to clinical trials in a record 11 months. CytoSolve has also demonstrated the lack of safety standards of genetically engineered foods (GMOs). He is regularly called upon nationally and internationally to share his experience and expertise in email, innovation, medicine and health. (See Below)

Only when Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai's papers were received by the Smithsonian on February 16, 2012, and after a Washington Post reporter wrote an article entitled, "V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai: Inventor of Email Honored by the Smithsonian," did a cabal of "internet pioneers and historians" loyal to the false narrative that the ARPANET and Ray Tomlinson invented email surface to attack Dr. Ayyadurai's lifelong contributions to email. As one MIT professor said,

“When [Shiva’s] material went into the Smithsonian, he threw a wrench into the self-styled and false history of ‘historians’ who had already written the ‘history of email.’ This was like a new fossil being found in Africa which completely changed the origin of humans, and it had to be destroyed.”

The Washington Post article and the facts it shared disrupted Raytheon's multibillion dollar marketing myth contending, among other things, that inserting the "@" sign between the username and the host server is equivalent to inventing email. The first email system, created by Dr. Ayyadurai in 1978 used the "." as the symbol. The "@" symbol is not email, and has been purposefully conflated through a multi-million dollar marketing campaign to be equated to the invention of email.

Raytheon is a major American defense contractor that competes in a robust and expanding $70 billion cybersecurity market. In 2014, Raytheon won $240 million in cybersecurity business and cites “reputation” among “principal competitive factors” considered by customers. They proudly showcase their employee, the late Ray Tomlinson, as “the inventor of email,” to establish this “reputation,” to acquire new clients who need to protect their email. They are now caught between the factual record and their marketing campaigns.

Raytheon and Tomlinson's supporters -- the ARPANET cabal -- used the occasion of Dr. Ayyadurai gaining global recognition in 2012 for the invention of email to discredit him. They unleashed vitriol on the Washington Post reporter and forced the editors to print a completely nebulous correction that Shiva Ayyadurai was "…not the inventor of electronic messaging." However, Dr. Ayyadurai never claimed to be the inventor of "electronic messaging," whose history goes back to the Morse Code telegraph of the 1800s.

Part of this cabal is a group called Special Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society (SIGCIS). Under the aegis of its "scholarly" blog, its chief spokesperson attacked Dr. Ayyadurai as well as any other experts and journalists who dared to share the historical facts about email's origin from Newark, New Jersey. At the same time, this "scholar" thanked "special interests" from Raytheon/BBN and the ARPANET community for supporting and contributing to his verbal lynching of Dr. Ayyadurai. The blog continued to write defamatory comments calling Dr. Ayyadurai a self-promoter and even attacking Dr. Ayyadurai's seminal research in the systems biology of genetically engineered foods (GMOs) - a topic that this group has absolutely no expertise. All of this took place, while these "scholars" and "historians" deliberately ignored the plagiaristic and truly self-promotional history of Raytheon, and praised the "aw shucks" humility of Ray Tomlinson, the non-inventor of email.

Other unethical individuals and internet rags colluded to simply erase the facts and ridiculed journalists such as Mo Rocca of CBS' Henry Ford's Innovation Nation Show and Doug Aamoth of Time Magazine, who shared the truth about email's origin. These individuals included trolls at TechDirt, who parroted false histories of email history to create bogus citations for the heavily censored and manipulated Wikipedia, with its constant revisionism and purges.

Typical revisionism included vengeful and retaliatory Wikipedia edits. For example, following the initial announcement, on November 3, 2016 of Dr. Ayyadurai's victory over Gawker Media, this cabal enforced a "consensus," in Wikipedia parlance, so as to denigrate Dr. Ayyadurai, in the first sentence of his Wikipedia article, as someone merely "notable for his controversial claim to be the 'inventor of email'."

Other surrogates in this attack included none other than David Crocker, and the online "Museum of Email & Digital Communications," where Crocker is listed as an "Analyst" along with Richi Jennings, another "Analyst" at this "museum," who is an active Wikipedia editor removing and manipulating facts on Dr. Ayyadurai's Wikipedia page. Along the same lines, Raytheon's Chief Scientist, who has collegial relations with Crocker, is on the Editorial Board of the journal IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, which publishes false histories of email, while ignoring the 1978 invention of email in Newark, NJ.

The nexus of collusion among the "internet pioneers and historians," and their surrogates is deliberate, as evident in their efforts to create fake news on their blogs, and "scholarly journals" for documenting a false and revisionist history, which trolls on Wikipedia then reference as "fact." This insidious system of generating fake news provides an incredibly tight-knit engine for falsifying the history of email.

This collusion on Wikipedia is best reflected in this email communication received by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai's assistant Manjula Balaji in 2015 from an experienced Wikipedia editor:

In the winter of 2015, Dr. David Skorton, the new Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, met with Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai and, after hearing the facts, urged him to find an investigative reporter to communicate his experiences. This document and the supplemental materials herein are a start towards supporting such an investigation.

As Dr. Leslie P. Michelson stated, “There is a big motivation to perpetuate the lie that Raytheon/BBN and the so-called 'internet pioneers' invented email.”

Regarding this, one simply needs to consider the core values of Raytheon/BBN and their surrogates when it comes to taking unearned credit. Several years ago, for example, the New York Times Managing Editor David Leonhardt began a scathing expose of William H. Swanson, the CEO of Raytheon, who had published a plagiarized book on “integrity,” by asking:

Michael A. Padlipsky, one of the leading researchers of the ARPANET community, and the author of nearly 20 RFCs, recollecting his experiences from the ARPANET years of the 1960s and 1970s, wrote in a famous essay, And They Argued All Night...:

And in 2012, following the attacks on Dr. Ayyadurai, Prof. Noam Chomsky of MIT commented: