[jcranmer]

The problem here is that when a reporter accidentally gave him more credit than was warranted and subsequently retracted that statement, he seems to have gone on a crusade to reobtain that credit. Rather like a certain unnamed political figure, he seems to be obsessed with seeking vindication, even when the facts do not match up with his story.

The basic fact is this: RFC 821 and 822 are the current email infrastructure (the most fundamental changes to the infrastructure are MIME and DNS routing, neither of which his system I suspect had any equivalent to). If I were to write you an email, my client would box it up in an RFC 822 formatted message and send it over a protocol described in RFC 821 to make sure that you receive it. Any definition of email that precludes this system is therefore fundamentally dishonest.

The second major issue is that Ayyaduri's invention has had no demonstrable influence on the development of email. This makes it hard to stomach the fine parsing of definitions. By contrast, for example, I consider the B&O railroad to be the first railroad in the US, a claim which does require a bit of contorting (it's the first one that opened for business on a common carrier principle). However, the B&O railroad undoubtedly had a major impact on US railroading history, even if you want to define the Mohawk & Hudson or the Granite Railway or somebody else as the first railroad.

Rather than merely be content to be known as a precocious inventor of an email program, he's trying his damnedest try to be known of the inventor of email in general even when the facts don't really support such a claim.

[chrismcb]

One thing I don't get... He keeps claiming that X isn't real email, because it doesn't mimic the inner office system... OK, so what did his software do that software at the time didn't?