The first email was sent in 1971 by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson over the ARPANET network in the United States.

Quick Scoop: When Was the First Email Sent?

  • Year: 1971.
  • Sender: Ray Tomlinson, a programmer at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
  • Network: ARPANET, the U.S. Defense Department–funded predecessor to the modern internet.
  • Purpose: A test message sent between two computers sitting side by side but connected via ARPANET.
  • Famous detail: The content was reportedly something like “QWERTYUIOP,” just a random keyboard string.

A Tiny Test That Changed Everything

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson was experimenting with ways to send messages between different computers on ARPANET rather than just between users on the same machine. He combined an existing local messaging tool with a file-transfer protocol to make this happen. To distinguish the user from the machine, he chose the @ symbol, creating the now-standard username@host format that every email address still uses today.

Tomlinson later said the first email was so trivial that he could not remember its exact wording, just that it was a nonsense test line, roughly “QWERTYUIOP.” No one at the time expected that simple test to become the backbone of global digital communication.

Why 1971 Still Matters Today

  • Email predates the World Wide Web by almost two decades, underscoring how long text-based network communication has been around.
  • The basic ideas from 1971—addresses, inboxes, messages routed over a network—are still the core of how email works now.
  • Later milestones, like the first email standard in 1973 and global expansion through the 1980s, built directly on Tomlinson’s early work.

In forum and tech-history discussions today, 1971 is widely cited as the birth year of modern email, with Ray Tomlinson recognized as its key pioneer.

TL;DR: The first email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson over ARPANET, likely containing a random test string like “QWERTYUIOP,” and it established the familiar username@host format we still use.

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