Two men are each called the inventor of email: one chose the @ sign between two computers in 1971, the other wrote a program he named EMAIL as a 14-year-old in 1978, and the fight over whose claim counts ended up in a federal courtroom
In late 1971, Ray Tomlinson wheeled his chair between two PDP-10 mainframes at BBN in Cambridge and sent the first message between computers on ARPANET, choosing the @ symbol because no one's name would ever contain it.