Backing up e-mail should be a frequent practice
Tomlinson's 'invention' came while improving a program called SNDMSG, which was in use since 1960s, that allows a user to compose, address, and send a message to other users' mailboxes in a single computer.
The first email, containing a 'forgettable' message, was sent between two computers that were literally side by side with their only physical connection being through the ARPANET, one of the first computer networks of the world.
Sanyal, now Advisor, Corporate Technology Organisation of TCS, said many Indians studying or researching in the US around that time had their first experience with email through ARPANET or the BITNET, a network used to exchange emails by academics of universities across the US.
Rajiv Gavai, professor of the Theoretical Physics Department, TIFR, was one of those Indians. As a post-doctoral fellow in Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, in the early '80s, he used emails of both ARPANET and BITNET to interact with co-authors who were several miles away.
Gavai was so impressed by "the ease of collaborative work, without use of the then expensive fax machines or the too-cryptic telex machines", that he initiated setting up of a similar BITNET-based academic network in India.