A former NeXT system engineer recounts the episode in which Steve Jobs sent him an email saying, 'That's a great idea. Thank you.'



Steve Heyman, a former Apple employee and former systems engineer at

NeXT , is talking about an email he once received from Steve Jobs.

From: Steve Jobs. 'Great idea, thank you.' | #haymanSplaining
https://blog.hayman.net/2025/05/06/from-steve-jobs-great-idea.html

In October 1991, Heyman was working as a new engineer at NeXT. At the time, NeXT had a total of 400 employees, of which three were based in Canada. Heyman was one of those three.

'In 1991, NeXT email was amazing,' Heyman said. 'Multimedia! Fonts! Attachments! Sound! I can't tell you how cool it was compared to the command-line plain text email that everyone was used to.'

Every time you booted up your computer, the following message from Jobs would appear in your email client: This message included an attachment called Lip Service, which was a revolutionary idea at the time because it allowed you to embed audio files in emails.



The attached audio file is below.


At NeXT, email addresses were typically set to the first letter of the first name plus the last name. For example, Heyman's email address was [email protected], while Jobs's was [email protected].

Also, at NeXT, it was possible to apply for an alias that could be set to any name. And since it turned out that no one was using the alias '[email protected]', Heyman applied to have '[email protected]' forwarded to '[email protected]'. This request was automatically processed and successfully accepted.

However, this was a big mistake. At the time, many outsiders were mistakenly sending emails to Jobs' email address, thinking it was '[email protected]', and emails that had previously been undeliverable and had errors began to arrive at Heyman's address all at once. Heyman was sent a large number of emails from media reporters, CEOs of other companies, and financial officers, and he panicked.

So he applied for the alias again and asked for '[email protected]' to be forwarded to Jobs' '[email protected].' This request was also accepted without any problems, but Heyman thought it would be better to tell Jobs what he had done, so he sent Jobs an email explaining the whole process.

Here is the reply from Jobs:



'That was a great idea. Thank you,' was the simple message, but Heyman said, 'I often thought about printing this email, putting it in a frame, and letting everyone imagine what a great idea it was.'

In addition, the following email was sent to Mr. Heyman, who retired from Apple in May 2025, from CEO Tim Cook. Mr. Heyman commented, 'My career began with an email from Steve Jobs and ended with an email from Tim Cook. I am a very lucky man.'

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