Who created National Email Day?

The email validation company ZeroBounce, which announced it on April 19, 2022. The company calls the day Email Day; the National prefix came from wider use rather than from the founder.

Why is National Email Day on April 23?

April 23 is the birthday of Ray Tomlinson, the BBN engineer who sent the first messages across a network in late 1971, and the founding announcement gives that birthday as the reason for the date. The first messages themselves were never dated more precisely than that.

Is National Email Day the same as Email Debt Forgiveness Day?

No, they are separate observances with different creators. Email Debt Forgiveness Day came from the podcast Reply All and is for sending overdue replies without apology; its own site now dates it to August 31, and earlier coverage placed it on April 30.

National Email Day

Next celebratedFriday, April 23, 2027

The first message sent between two computers was the instructions for sending one, and the machines stood side by side with the ARPANET as their only link. April 23 marks it, though Tomlinson could never name the day.

See how to celebrate

Countdown to the day

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Last updated September 6, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?

YEARLY DATEApril 23

OBSERVED INUnited States

CATEGORYTech

SUBCATEGORYSocial Media

ORIGIN

Corporate Initiative

FOUNDING ENTITY

ZeroBounce

FIRST OBSERVED

2022

HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

An email company picked the engineer's birthday.

The email validation and deliverability company ZeroBounce announced Email Day on April 19, 2022, and set it on April 23, the birthday of Ray Tomlinson, who sent the first messages across a network in late 1971. Wider circulation later attached the National prefix that the founder itself does not use.

Read the 2022 launch announcementvia ZeroBounce

INTRO

Anchored to a birthday instead of an anniversary

National Email Day honors a man who kept having to correct people about the thing he was famous for. On his own website, Ray Tomlinson kept a page headed Frequently Made Mistakes, which opened by complaining that errors about the early history of email were made often enough to bug him.

One of the corrections was about himself. Asked in 1993 when he had written the program, he guessed, and he guessed wrong. He later placed the first messages in late 1971 and admitted he could not name the day.

The date the founder later chose is not the anniversary of the invention. April 23 is the date Tomlinson was born, and the record fixes that one exactly.

ORIGINS

Email Day history

INTRODUCTION

The day points at one engineer and one year, but the record behind it is older and more crowded. At MIT, a proposal for a MAIL command circulated in a Compatible Time-Sharing System staff note written by Pat Crisman, Glenda Schroeder and Louis Pouzin, dated by its own numbering to the turn of 1965. Tom Van Vleck, who helped build that mail, has written that he knows of no documented computer mail older than the one he worked on that year.

Those messages never left the machine they were written on. Tomlinson said as much himself: single-computer electronic mail, he wrote, had existed since at least the early 1960s. What did not exist was a way to reach a person sitting at a different computer.

CHAPTER 01

The merge that crossed the gap

In 1971, Tomlinson was at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, improving a local mail program called SNDMSG. He was also working on an experimental file transfer program, CPYNET, and he noticed it could drop text onto the end of a mailbox file just as easily as SNDMSG could.

The missing piece was small. CPYNET could send and receive whole files but had no way to append to one, and Tomlinson called adding that a no-brainer. He folded the transfer code into the mail program, and network mail existed.

He still needed a way to say which machine a person was at. He took the at sign, then an idle key with one narrow commercial job: marking a unit price, as in ten items @ $1.95. He used it to mean that a user was at some other host, and user@host has meant that ever since.

CHAPTER 02

Fixing the fields

Two years on, Tomlinson put his name to a memo called RFC 561, written with Abhay Bhushan, Ken Pogran and Jim White. Its complaint was practical: systems were sending author, title and date in whatever shape they liked, which made it next to impossible for a program to handle incoming mail intelligently. Their fix proposed From, Date and Subject, and those fields never left.

CHAPTER 03

A company names a day

None of that history produced a day on the calendar. The observance came much later and from a business: ZeroBounce, an email validation and deliverability company in Santa Barbara, which announced Email Day on April 19, 2022 and set it on Tomlinson's birthday. The company had trailed it on its own account the day before, in a post that opened: at last, we can tell you.

Its chief executive, Liviu Tanase, said the day recognized the innovation and the man who dreamt it up. The same announcement closed with a sale, 23% off any purchase to the end of that month. The company has run the day ever since.

TIMELINE

Timeline

MIT proposes a MAIL command

A Compatible Time-Sharing System staff note by Pat Crisman, Glenda Schroeder and Louis Pouzin proposed letting any user send a message to any other.

First messages cross the network

Ray Tomlinson folded a file transfer program into local mail software at BBN and sent the first messages across the ARPANET.

RFC 561 standardizes the headers

A memo co-signed by Tomlinson proposed the From, Date and Subject fields that still sit at the top of every message.

A student writes a program called EMAIL

V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai built a FORTRAN electronic mail system for a New Jersey medical school and named it EMAIL.

Internet Hall of Fame inducts Tomlinson

The Internet Society announced his induction at its Global INET meeting in Geneva on April 23, his birthday.

ZeroBounce announces Email Day

The email validation company launched the observance and fixed it on April 23 in Tomlinson's honor.

GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about National Email Day

The two computers were side by side

Tomlinson wrote that the machines he sent between stood next to each other, and that the ARPANET was their only physical connection apart from the floor they sat on.

The first network email explained itself

Once he was satisfied the program worked, Tomlinson used it to send his group the instructions for using it. In his words, the first use of network email announced its own existence.

A museum owns the at sign and cannot hang it

The Museum of Modern Art took the @ into its design collection in 2010 and catalogues it as a work credited to Tomlinson. The entry names the typeface it is displayed in and lists the object as not on view.

The at sign was a typewriter key first

MoMA dates it on the American Underwood keyboard to 1885, where it was known as the commercial a, and notes it was in the original 1963 list of ASCII computer codes.

Software could not be patented when EMAIL was written

The Smithsonian records that patents were unavailable for computer programs at the time, so Ayyadurai registered a copyright for EMAIL in 1982 instead, along with its user manual.

MYTH VS FACT

Common Misconceptions

The myth

Ray Tomlinson invented the @ symbol.

The truth

He denied it in writing. The at sign is centuries old, and Tomlinson said only that he may have saved it from being dropped from the keyboard, not that he created it.

The myth

The first email message was QWERTYUIOP.

The truth

Tomlinson called that a misquote of his own hedge. He had said the message was something like QWERTYUIOP, and that it was equally likely to have been TESTING 1 2 3 4.

The myth

The Smithsonian settled who invented email.

The truth

It published a statement saying the opposite. After collecting materials from V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai in 2012, the museum said it did not claim he was the inventor of email, and that exchanging messages through computer systems predates his work.

The myth

ZeroBounce created a day called National Email Day.

The truth

It created Email Day. The launch announcement, the company's own launch post and its campaign page all use that name, and the National prefix came from wider circulation rather than the founder.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why National Email Day Matters

RECORD

The question of who invented email has been to federal court.

A defamation suit brought by V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai over articles challenging his claim to have invented the modern system of email was dismissed in a US district court in 2017, largely on First Amendment grounds, and the parties settled two years later with a statement issued jointly by both sides. The day names one engineer, but the record it points at has been contested in court rather than closed.

SCALE

The user base is still forecast to grow

The Radicati Group projects that worldwide email users will rise from over 4.4 billion in 2024 to over 4.9 billion by 2028, counting business and consumer users together. That is a market research forecast rather than a headcount, but it is the direction the firm reports for both groups.

DESIGN

Email was designed for people who are not there

Tomlinson said the invention came from wanting a method that did not require the person to be there when the message was sent, so the receiver could read and answer at their convenience. Decades on he said he still used email every day, and that it was his preferred form of communication.

GET INVOLVED

How to Observe National Email Day

Clear your inbox to zero

The company behind the day has run an inbox zero challenge around April 23, asking people to deal with every unread message. Start with the oldest thread and work forward.

READ

Read Tomlinson's own account of the first email

Tomlinson wrote up how he merged the two programs, and the page survives in the Internet Archive. It is short, plain, and written by the person who was there.

OPEN

Open the full header block on a message

Every message you receive carries a block of header lines above the text you actually read. Open that block on something in your inbox, then compare it with RFC 561, the memo that proposed the format.

LOOK

Look up the at sign in a museum catalogue

The Museum of Modern Art keeps a collection entry for the @ symbol. Reading it is a quick lesson in what a design collection can hold.

SEND

Send the message you have been avoiding

The founder's stated aim for the day is to highlight the benefits of using email thoughtfully. Write the reply you have been putting off, and keep it short.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Email Day?

1 / 8

Why does National Email Day fall on April 23?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial observance with no legal standing, and a search of the Federal Register for the phrase returns no US proclamation or notice, so it is a normal working day.