There’s no reliable record of “the second email ever sent,” and historians generally agree we’ll probably never know its exact content.

What we do know

  • Email as we know it emerged around 1971 on ARPANET, the early network that preceded the modern internet.
  • US programmer Ray Tomlinson is credited with sending the first networked email between two computers in 1971.
  • That first message was a throwaway test like “QWERTYUIOP” or “test 123” – Tomlinson himself later admitted he didn’t remember the exact wording.

Given how casually those tests were done, no one was preserving message logs as historic artifacts. That means any “second email ever sent” would have been another small test, but it wasn’t documented.

Why the second email is unknowable

  • Early ARPANET email was experimental and informal; people were just checking if the system worked, not curating a record for posterity.
  • Storage was expensive and limited, so routine test messages weren’t archived with historical care.
  • Even the content of the first email is fuzzy in the historical record, which makes tracking the second essentially impossible.

So, the best answer is: it was almost certainly another trivial test message sent by Ray Tomlinson (or a close colleague) on ARPANET in 1971—but its exact text and even the precise sender/recipient are lost to history.

Quick Scoop

  • First email: Sent by Ray Tomlinson in 1971 over ARPANET, between two neighboring computers.
  • Content: Likely nonsense or a basic test phrase (e.g., keyboard mashing), not a meaningful sentence.
  • Second email: Almost certainly another similar test, but no surviving record exists.
  • Takeaway: We can date the birth of email, but not reconstruct message-by-message history from those first minutes.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.