Reading that, it seems like there is no one inventor of email, but a bunch of different solutions, perhaps leading to the 1981 RFC for SMTP by Jonathan B. Poste

Reading that, it seems like there is no one inventor of email, but a bunch of different solutions, perhaps leading to the 1981 RFC for SMTP by Jonathan B. Postel, which I would guess is the beginning of the actual current email implementation: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc788 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc788