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Email Inventor Ray Tomlinson Dies At 74 (techrepublic.com)
vikingpower writes: ARPAnet pioneer and networking legend Ray Tomlinson, who is best known for his contributions in developing email standards, has died at 74. Tomlinson was best known for choosing the @ symbol to indicate a message should be sent to a different computer on a network. He also led development of standards for the from, subject, and date fields found in every email message sent today.
When Tomlinson first showed his invention to his colleague Jerry Burchfiel, Tomlinson said, "Don't tell anyone! This isn't what we're supposed to be working on." May Ray rest in peace in /dev/null.
The part after the @ is a domain name. According to RFC 1035, domain names are case insensitive. Technically however, the local part of the address (the part before the @) is case sensitive, or rather can be case sensitive. It would be wrong to send mail to user@domain.example when you were given the address User@domain.example. In practice the local part is almost always case-insensitive too.
Thank goodness he took the smart option.
If you mean he decided to make email addresses case insensitive, then you're wrong. The interpretation of the local part is up to the receiving end. "User@example.com" and "user@example.com" are different email addresses and mails to these addresses may end up in different mailboxes. In practice this is rarely the case, but the standard does not allow the sending MUA or intermediate MTAs to make any assumptions about the interpretation of the local part by the destination MTA.