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In the early 1970's, Ray Tomlinson was working on a small team developing the TENEX operating system, with local email programs called SNDMSG and READMAIL.
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In late 1971, Tomlinson created the first ARPANET email application when he updated SNDMSG by adding a program called CPYNET capable of copying files over the network, and informed his colleagues by sending them an email using the new program with instructions on how to use it.
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Ray Tomlinson inventing email in 1972.
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In 1975 John Vital developed some software to organize email.
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In 1975, the DARPA program manager Steve Walker initiated a project at RAND to develop an MSG-like email capability for the Unix operating system.
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By 1976 email had really taken off, and commercial packages began to appear.
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Since 1982, Marshall Rose and others have upgraded and maintained MH, and it has become the standard email application for the Unix environment.
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Shortly thereafter, in 1989, the Compuserve mail system also connected to the NSFNET, through the Ohio State University network.
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In 1993, the large network service providers America Online and Delphi started to connect their proprietary email systems to the Internet, beginning the large scale adoption of Internet email as a global standard.
