Talk:Email

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Usage other than webmail?

Are there any numbers for people using e-mail with, e.g., IMAP4, POP3, SMTP, clients on their computers? Without those numbers it's hard to guage the relevance of a drop in webmail usage. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 04:13, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

Please do not edit cited quotations for flow and readability

A quote is not a paraphrase and it is not appropriate to reword it, although it is appropriate to, e.g., inset (sic), replace extraneous text with ellipses.. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 15:53, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Flow and readability are important, but not at the expense of accuracy

Recent edits by 2600:387:b:9a2::14 shortened some of the text for improved readability, but in the process introduced errors. In particular, there is a major difference between it seemed likely that either … would predominate (a true claim about expectations of market penetration) and either … would dominate. (a false claim about actual market penetration.) Also, earlier edits from the same IP address changed quoted text; quotes, especially those in {{cite|quote=}}, are not paraphrases and should remain exactly as given in the source, except for alterations that are clearly editorial, e.g., replacing extraneous text with ellipses.

I would have edited the article, but there are pending revisions. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 16:26, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

"How email works" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect How email works. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 May 2#How email works until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 15:15, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

About email article

I want to say this i hear from someone that email was bot invented in America its Shiva Ayyadurai , a 14 year old boy from India invented it in 1978 Satyampandey543 (talk) 12:23, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

@Satyampandey543: Such a claim needs verification from a reliable source. Do you have any citations? Peaceray (talk) 15:16, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

Unless the boy had a time machine he was not the first even of he actually existed and was not aware of prior art. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 17:07, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

There are articles about Ayyadurai's inventions, but it seems that he wrote an email program he named "email", copyrighted in December 1982, so he "invented email" in the same sense you could write/copyright a program or book named email today and technically say that you "invented email". Ayyidurai makes broader claims about inventing "the first email Email System", but those seem false. He has a personal web page discussing his inventions, but he has an unusual trait of capitalizing words without a clear purpose, so it's difficult to understand when he means EMAIL in the generic sense or as the name of his program. His dubious claims might merit a brief mention in this article, as they do come up in media stories lately because he's running for a political office. A district court ruled in a libel case that "Whether plaintiff's claim to have invented email is 'fake' depends upon the operative definition of 'email'. Because that definition does not have a single, objectively correct answer, the claim is incapable of being proved true or false." [source: The Register] Agyle (talk) 19:05, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

Terminology section, changing origin of term from 1993 to 1979

The sentence "Electronic mail is called email or e-mail since around 1993" cited a link to output of a Google program that analyzes word frequency, apparently from a particular set of books Google scanned. That's not a reliable source for the claim, and even if it were, you could make the case for any year in the query's output range (1980 to 1995); 1993 seems like an arbitrary choice by whoever wrote the sentence.

I changed the sentence to "The term electronic mail has been in use with its current meaning since at least 1975, and variations of the shorter E-mail have been in use since at least 1979", citing the OED and WaPo. I chose the E-mail variation for that sentence, since that's the specific format used in the 1979 example the OED cites.