Well, it depends on what you count as the beginning of Internet mail, but Sendmail, Inc., naturally counts from when Eric Allman wrote the first version of Sendmail in 1981, and is holding a shindig tomorrow, 25 October 2006 at the Computer History Museum in Mt. View, California.

Of course, Ray Tomlinson beat that by a decade when he implemented the first known networked mail system in 1971, and Tom Van Vleck implemented mail on CTSS at MIT in 1965, as well as Multics mail, about 1969.

But the Internet didn’t exist back then, and at least the experimental Internet did in 1981, so Eric’s got a fair claim on the beginning of Internet mail.

-jsq