History
The first email in Germany
On 3 August 1984 at 10:14, a message from Boston arrived in Karlsruhe. It was unremarkably worded and nevertheless marked the day Germany was connected to the emerging internet.
The wording
The sender was Laura Breeden of the CSNET Coordination and Information Center, based at Bolt Beranek and Newman in Boston. The recipients were Werner Zorn, head of the computing department at the University of Karlsruhe, and his colleague Michael Rotert.
From: Laura Breeden <breeden@csnet-sh>
To: zorn@germany.csnet, rotert@germany.csnet
This is your official welcome to CSNET.
We are glad to have you aboard.
The heart of the message. No manifesto, no ceremony — a service confirmation of the kind a network operator sends when a connection works.
It had been sent the day before, on 2 August at 12:35 US time. That it only arrived the next day was down to the intermediate stops along the way — mail was passed from machine to machine, with waiting time at every hop. That delay is why some accounts give 2 August and others 3 August. Both dates are correct; they simply refer to different ends of the same journey.
What the addresses tell you
zorn@germany.csnet — an entire country as part of an address. That is not
hindsight exaggeration but an accurate description of the state of things: there was
one connection in Germany, and it stood in Karlsruhe. Anyone abroad wanting to write
to a German network participant addressed it to that machine.
Today's structure, with country codes on the right and a free hierarchy of names before them, had already been described but was not yet in use everywhere. Addresses like this one are the intermediate stage: already sorted by country, but still carrying the name of the network you reached them through.
What was genuinely new
Electronic messages from Germany already existed — by dialling into American machines, via corporate networks, via bulletin board systems. The difference lies in the direction: until then you had to connect to a remote system and collect messages there. From 3 August 1984 onwards there was a machine in Germany that was itself part of the network and that mail was delivered to.
The message was received on a VAX 11/750 running BSD UNIX — a device the size of a refrigerator, equipped with the then still young TCP/IP protocols. Remarkable from today's vantage point: the operating system and the protocol family on that machine are in a direct line the same ones serving this page.
How this connects to the rest
The message from Boston is also instructive because it shows the conditions under which email was designed. In 1984 the participants knew each other. Getting connected was an event people welcomed each other over in writing. That somebody might write in another's name was not a practical worry but a theoretical one.
Everything that is needed today in the way of retrofitted safeguards — sender authorisations, signatures, alignment rules — is the answer to that condition having fallen away. The protocol did not change. Who takes part in it did.