In 1974 I started Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and I got my first email accounts (plural) on various timesharing systems. The one t

In 1974 I started Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and I got my first email accounts (plural) on various timesharing systems. The one that I used most was on a Honeywell 6050 TSS system (we called that one Honeybun, or the 'bun for short) and using the campus comms network, we would login to check email from several buildings on campus, many times a day. That comms network also allowed dialup modem access using acoustic couplers and I remember one department that had a TI Silent 700 terminal with acoustic coupler and modem, specifically so that they could connect to the 'bun. And the IBM VM 370/CMS system also had email. People on that system developed a way to interconnect mainframes across the globe using a system called BITNET that was an email predecessor of the Internet proper. On the 'bun we had the MAIL command which was either part of Honeywell's GCOS TSS or perhaps was one of the enhancements that we got from Bell Labs. When the University started setting up UNIX systems using the software from BELL Labs, we interconnected the UNIX email systems with the 'bun. Then by 1976 Waterloo folk had built an enhanced email system call Space Mail (because the command to invoke it was to type one space by MAIL) which had almost all the features of modern email systems such as revoking a message that you had sent by deleting it from the recipient's mailbox. I suspect that no single person invented email. We lived in a world surrounded by paper mail delivery systems so at the earliest possible moment, anyone who could, was writing code to emulate mail systems in the computer. It's that simple.