There are interviews in Tamil and English language media about V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai and his work in high school and later with respect to electronic mail.
A statement issued by MIT will be useful to make things clear. http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N5/corrections.html "A brief published on Jan. 11 incorrectly titled Shiva Ayyaduri and credits him with the first copyright to email. He is a faculty lecturer. Also, while he holds a copyright from 1982 titled “EMAIL,” Ayyaduri is not the inventor of email, which began in the 1960s." This raises the question of who was the first to coin and use the term, email. It appears this coinage was done by Shiva Ayyadurai in 1978 when he was 14, and at high school. He explains that there was a six-letter limit on program names in the Fortran IV language, he chose ‘email’ inside the code. http://www.vashiva.com/innovation/email/vashiva-inventor-history.asp#inv03 In early 70s, the term "electronic mail" was used for fax machines. In late 70's and early 80's "electronic mail" was used for what we now call email. For example, (1) J. M. McQuillan and D. C. Walden, “Designing Electronic Mail Systems That People Will Use,” SIGOA Newsletter, May l980, vol. 1, no. 2; InfoMail User Guide, BBN Information Management Corporation, Cambridge, MA. (2) J. M. McQuillan and D. C. Walden, “Portable Software for Electronic Mail Makes it Hardware- Independent,” Electronics, March 10, 1981, pp. 167–171. networked e-mail, http://walden-family.com/bbn/chapter-19.pdf It will be nice if some one can post the 1979 article from Electronics magazine that uses E-mail for the first time. See Oxford English Dictionary site, http://public.oed.com/appeals/email/ "1979 Electronics 7 June 63 (heading) Postal Service pushes ahead with E-mail." While email tech development has a long history but it was known by different names. It does seem that in 1978, a high school student has coined the word, email, which is now used by everyone. N. Ganesan