Shiva Ayyadurai Absolutely, Positively did not invent email

Shiva Ayyadurai is a deceitful, lying, self-aggrandizing dickhead. He claims to have invented email, even though this has been proven, beyond any doubt, not to actually be what scientists call "fact".

Shiva Ayyadurai lies. He did not invent email. Not even a little bit. MIT, who was funding his lab, dissociated itself from him completely after he made this claim, and dropped all funding for his lab; they did not want to be associated with such an obvious charlatan.

The only grain of truth to his claim — and it is a very, very small grain — is that he appears to be the first person to have registered a copyright with a title containing the term "EMAIL". Ayyadurai believes this makes him the inventor of email, but that is completely ridiculous; all it means is he registered a copyright. Other people were using the terms "e-mail" and "email" long before he wrote his program.

More evidence of just how shallow Shiva Ayyadurai's character is

After he successfully conned a Washington Post reporter into writing an "inventor of email" story about him, he loudly crowed about it on his website. The Washington Post ombudsman later issued a retraction and correction confirming they never should have made that claim, and that he clearly did not invent email.

Ayyadurai donated some of his early papers and documentation of his email program to the Smithsonian. He then used this fact to loudly crow that the Smithsonian had recognized him as "the inventor of email". This is absolute, total bullshit, and the Smithsonian issued a statement explicitly denying that they have ever recognized him as the inventor of email, and that the concept and execution of email predates Ayyadurai's work, as everyone should know.

To beat a dead horse: SIGCIS is a collection of people who have long been active in computers and electronic communication. They state, absolutely and positively, that all of Ayyadurai's claimed inventions were in use long before Ayyadurai wrote his email program, and that his claims are unadulterated bullshit.

Ayyadurai: Threat or Menace? (Or just a gargantuan asshole?)

His tendency to sue people who point out the absolutely true, incontrovertible fact that he did not invent email clearly shows that he is a thin-skinned, censorious asshat. Ignore everything he says or writes, as it is likely to be more of the same bullshit.

Update: The Truth Prevails

On 6 September 2017, US district judge Dennis Saylor ruled against Ayyadurai in his lawsuit against TechDirt.

So Shiva Ayyadurai may be a lot of things. He may be a shitbag. He may be an asshat. He may be a douchenozzle. He could be one of the world's most gargantuan, self-absorbed, litigous, preening, lying assholes. But he didn't invent email, and TechDirt pointing that out to the world is not libel.