The first email was sent in late 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, an engineer at the contractor BBN working on ARPANET, the U.S. research network that predated the web. He sent a test message between two computers sitting side by side and, in the process, chose the @ sign to separate user from machine — a decision that still shapes every address today.
Who sent the first email?
Ray Tomlinson, a programmer at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is credited with the first networked email. BBN was a defense contractor doing much of the heavy engineering on ARPANET, and Tomlinson was tinkering with message programs in his spare time rather than under any formal mandate.
People had been leaving each other messages on shared mainframes for years before 1971. What made Tomlinson’s work different is that he sent a message from one computer to a separate computer across a network. That leap — machine to machine, not user to user on the same box — is why he gets the credit. The web itself would not arrive until 1991, which means email beat the first website to the punch by roughly two decades.
What did the first email say?
Nobody knows, and that includes Tomlinson. In later interviews he said the test messages were entirely forgettable — likely something like QWERTYUIOP, the top row of letters on a keyboard, or a similar string of nonsense typed just to confirm the system worked.
He was sending these messages between two PDP-10 machines that sat in the same room, connected through ARPANET. There was no ceremony, no sense of making history. As Tomlinson put it more than once, the messages were “entirely forgettable” precisely because the point was the plumbing, not the prose. Compare that to the first photo on the internet or the first YouTube video, both of which at least had memorable content. Email’s origin story is gloriously mundane.
Why the @ sign?
Tomlinson needed a character to split the user’s name from the name of the host computer. He scanned the keyboard for something that would never appear in a person’s name and would not be misread by the software. The @ sign was nearly perfect: it already meant “at” in commercial usage, it was sitting unused on the Teletype keyboard, and it had no other job inside the messaging code.
So tomlinson@host literally read as “Tomlinson at host.” It was a pragmatic choice made in seconds that turned out to be one of the most durable design decisions in computing. Decades later it became the defining glyph of the internet age, eventually earning a spot in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
The SNDMSG and CPYNET combination
The technical trick was stitching together two existing programs. SNDMSG was a local utility that let users leave messages for one another on the same machine. CPYNET was an experimental file-transfer program that could move data across ARPANET. Tomlinson modified SNDMSG so that it could hand a message to CPYNET, which then delivered it to a mailbox file on a remote computer. Email, in other words, was a hack — two tools taped together to do something neither was designed for alone.
How long did email predate the web?
About twenty years. Email worked over ARPANET starting in 1971; Tim Berners-Lee did not propose the World Wide Web until 1989 and did not put the first site online until 1991. For two full decades, “going online” mostly meant text, file transfers, and electronic mail — no browsers, no clickable links, no pages.
This is one of the most misunderstood facts in internet history: people conflate “the internet” with “the web,” but the network and its killer app, email, were humming along while the web was still science fiction.
| Milestone | Year | Who |
|---|---|---|
| First networked email | 1971 | Ray Tomlinson |
| Queen Elizabeth II sends email | 1976 | Royal Signals and Radar Establishment |
| First spam message | 1978 | Gary Thuerk |
| First website online | 1991 | Tim Berners-Lee |
When did the Queen send an email?
In 1976, Queen Elizabeth II sent an email over ARPANET from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern, England — making her one of the earliest heads of state to do so. Her username for the occasion was reportedly HME2, for “Her Majesty Elizabeth II.” It was a demonstration of the network’s reach, and a reminder that email’s reputation as official, serious technology arrived long before it became everyday.
When did spam arrive?
Spam showed up fast — 1978, just seven years after email itself. Gary Thuerk, a marketer at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), sent an unsolicited message promoting a new line of computers to several hundred ARPANET users on the U.S. West Coast. The recipients were not amused, and administrators complained that the message violated the network’s acceptable use.
Thuerk has cheerfully accepted the title of “father of spam,” and by some accounts the blast did generate millions in sales, which only encouraged the practice. The word “spam” itself, borrowed from a Monty Python sketch, came later. Email had barely learned to walk before someone figured out how to abuse it — a pattern the internet would repeat with the first banner ad and, eventually, the Morris worm.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who really invented email?
Ray Tomlinson is credited with the first email sent between two computers over a network, in 1971. Earlier systems let users leave messages on a shared mainframe, but Tomlinson’s innovation was sending a message across ARPANET from one machine to another, and choosing the @ sign to address it.
What was the first email message?
It is lost to history because it was meant to be. Tomlinson tested his program with throwaway strings like QWERTYUIOP and later described the messages as entirely forgettable. He was confirming the system worked, not composing anything worth saving.
Why is the @ symbol used in email?
Tomlinson chose @ because it separated the user’s name from the host computer’s name and was a character that would never appear inside someone’s username. It conveniently already meant “at,” so name@host read naturally as “name at host.”
Did email come before the web?
Yes, by roughly twenty years. Email ran on ARPANET from 1971, while the World Wide Web was not proposed until 1989 and went live in 1991. The network and email existed long before browsers and web pages.
Who sent the first spam email?
Gary Thuerk, a marketer at Digital Equipment Corporation, sent the first known spam message in 1978. He blasted an unsolicited product pitch to hundreds of ARPANET users, drawing complaints and earning himself the nickname “father of spam.”