I worked as a sysop and sysprog on the PLATO system that was mostly developed on the University of Illinois campus.
PLATO’s email system was already well developed when I came on board, roughly in 1973 as a student. Sysprog Ray Ozzie, later of Lotus Notes and Microsoft fame, the first $2B man, did a good bit of the thinking and most of the implementation of PLATO’s mail system.
On PLATO, there were personal notes (’pnotes’) and group notes (’gnotes’). Gnotes were like bulletin boards where various types of access restrictions were possible. Pnotes were a lot like current email on one’s internet mail login. It was usually more directly related to what today would be understood as one’s ‘internet provider’ rather than something as loose hotmail, gmail, yahoo, etc.
Shiva definitely came into a well-developed email field by 1978 and would have had to have blinders on not to be aware of those other places where email had already been developed. More likely: he “borrowed” from others and called it his own.
Shiva imho is a very pride-filled man, this is the main reason why he felt ignored, jilted, etc over Trump not employing his ‘help’ with voter fraud.
Also as I understand it he named his email application EMAIL - sneaky way to add to his long list of accomplishments again imho.