Not to take anything away from his legacy, but isn't it a stretch to talk about the "invention" of email when we had telex, telegrams, heliography, scrolls of vellum carried by Roman messenger, and so on? What's left to invent?
Although obviously email was conceptually based on a very old notion of communication, embodied, as you point out, by many media that came before it, it had to solve a few small, specific problems inherent in moving messages from one system to another via a simple network protocol.
The use of the "user@domain" notion of identity seems mundane today, but in some important ways it was a huge breakthrough in the way that people thought about humans and the systems that need to work in order for them to be contacted.
Is it because the "@" form is more stand-alone while the "!" embeds with it a sense of what you think others might think is notable?
"Fact #2: Ray Tomlinson “did not invent email”, he modified SNDMSG for exchanging text messages across computers - See more at: http://www.inventorofemail.com/claims_about_email.asp#False-...
Despite his aggressive campaign to be recognized for something notable other than his participation in pseudoscience, marketing BS and corrupt government organizations, the rest of the world remains unconvinced. He had a single class he was teaching at MIT at the time all the media articles hit, in which he introcuded a new term that he used to aggressively market himself as an expert in an "emerging field". His various sites link between each other as proof of his excellence. This type of self-referential press is a specialty of his. He even directly edited his own Wikipedia article as part of his media campaign.
You'll note that the first paragraph ends in a sentence with a dozen "references". This is how his edits always look and the page was originally full of sentences with 5+ references, which made tracking down legitimate information quite difficult. It's undergone heavy editing since then, but he still drops in for edit wars.
There's a good chance that snake oil is involved if he's anywhere near a project.
'Ayyadurai later said it was not "a formal wedding or marriage", but a celebration of their "friendship in a spiritual ceremony with close friends and her family.'
It's even hard to take the claim that Shiva's invention was the first to mimic inter-office mail seriously: all of the header fields are clearly mentioned in RFC 680.
In other words, the only way that you can even plausibly claim that Shiva invented email is to define email so narrowly that the only candidate is, in fact, his product. This should come across about as absurd as saying that FORTRAN can't be the first programming language because it didn't include an if statement.