Somewhere I may still have a 25(?) page 1974(?) published directory of all known email addresses on the ARPAnet. As I recall the addresses were centrally assigned to be a minimal number of characters because many people were still using ASR33 teletypes. I was something like RMM5@BBN.

SPAM as a term existed on usenet at least in the early 80s for a posting that was crossposted to many inappropriate newsgroups. And as I recall some of this spam was blatant comercial advertising.

My weblog, http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/2002/08/13.html#a62 has a link to a Datamation Interview with Ray Tomlinson who is credited with inventing e-mail in 1971, and Discovery Magazine gave him a special award because of his achievements. I see that Earl has 1972 for when the software was released, that Ray wrote. The discrepancy might be based on who got what info when. Was there any beta testing? Was it patented or copyrighted before it was released?

JIMWICh: yup. As mentioned in the quote, SMTP was to replace
previous email standards, so it wasn't the birth of email, just the
birth of the present form.

And twenty years on the Encrypted: header still isn't in use.

Actually SPAM was invented on April 12, 1994. http://news.com.com/2008-1082-868483.html

Um, okay... Maybe one aspect of email is *officially* twenty years old, but email is actually *thirty* years old. It was developed by Roy Tomlinson in 1972, who was working for BBN after graduating from MIT.

http://www.scim.vuw.ac.nz/comms/502Resources/502NotesFive.htm

A programmer, Earl Sacerdoti, that I met several years at Portola Dimensional Systems, ago told me that he believes he's the first person to have included his email address on his business card. this was in 1975. He has a photo of the card:

http://www.copernican.com/personal.html

From Earl's site:

  "I have a business card from 1975 with an Internet address
  (of course, it was an ARPAnet address at the time) printed
  on it. I haven't been able to find anyone else with a business
  card older than that with a 'net address. Please send me
  mail (mailto:earl@copernican.com) if you have one that's
  older. I was organizing a project at SRI to build software
  that queried multiple databases distributed around the
  ARPAnet. Because I was collaborating with folks in Boston,
  Washington, Los Angeles, and San Diego who were all also
  on the net, I found myself always jotting my email address
  on my cards. So when I was promoted and needed new cards,
  I asked to have my email address printed on them. SRI
  supported creativity, so they arranged it.

  Roy Tomlinson of BBN released the first intercomputer email
  application in 1972, so there were about three years in which
  someone else could have produced such a card."

What makes it such a great RFC is that it invokes the name of Muhammad Ali!

Important dates in Internet History:
August 13 1982 Birth of email
August 14 1982 Birth of SPAM