[SIGCIS-Members] Email History -- unresolved questions

[James Sumner]

> ·“Electronic mail,” as a phrase I have usage of Business Week going back
> to 1975. Am interested in earlier usage, particularly in publications
> aimed at business or the general public.
>
> ·“email” or “e-mail” as a word. A Google Groups (formerly Deja News)
> archive of a May 1981 post suggests that the Compuserve email program
> might have been called EMAIL.

The _Oxford English Dictionary_ is always worth a look for this kind of 
query. The team who deal with these things put a lot of work into 
tracing authenticated uses as far back as they can (working to a fairly 
strict standard of authentication); a typical word entry gives the first 
known usage of any kind, followed by a series of later ones to 
illustrate the process of popularisation and/or subtle changes of meaning.

Thus, for "electronic mail", they give

1959    _Appleton [Wisconsin] Post-Crescent_ 2 Nov. a6/4   Postmaster 
General Summerfield plans split-second electronic mail.
1969    _Law & Contemp. Probl._ 34 447   Facsimile newspaper or 
electronic mail delivery.
1977    _Science_ 18 Mar. 1161/1   Electronic mail can be originated by 
conventional means (typewriter, handwriting, printing).
1978    _Globe & Mail_ [Toronto] 8 Dec. 4/5   The world's first 
completely electronic mail service is scheduled to start operating in 
Canada this February.

And for "email"/"e-mail",

1979    _Electronics_ 7 June 63 (heading)    Postal Service pushes ahead 
with E-mail.

This corresponds to the snippet at
books.google.co.uk/books?id=xTFWAAAAMAAJ&q="e-mail"+intitle:electronics&dq="e-mail"
which is enough to show that "Postal Service" is the USPS. Does anyone 
here have access to a back run of _Electronics_, I wonder?

Perhaps surprisingly, the OED doesn't see any noteworthy changes to the 
circulation of "e-mail" till much later than the episode we're 
interested in -- 1986 -- when it appears (without scarequotes) in the 
_Times_ of London. It first finds "email" without the hyphen in 2005, 
which I suspect could easily be antedated.

As a aside, the first authenticated use of "email" as a verb is as follows:

1983    Computokid in net.micro (Usenet newsgroup) 25 Aug.,   Young 
stuff interested in correspondence (via dull old paper mail) might email 
a letter to me to forward.

As a much further aside aside, "email" is actually found in 1684, and 
"emayle" in 1594 -- but as a variant of "enamel".

Hope this helps!
James