In a personal retrospective published on May 6, 2025, former NeXT systems engineer Steve Hayman said an email alias error in 1991 led to the only message he ever personally received from Steve Jobs: “Great idea, thank you.” The account describes a small but unusually vivid moment from the early NeXT era, when the company’s internal email system was still novel enough that ordinary users could forward mail with only a few clicks and experiment with custom aliases.

Hayman wrote that he was one of a handful of employees in Canada and had joined NeXT in October 1991. He said each employee at the company automatically received a standard first-initial, last-name email address, while some workers were able to request more distinctive aliases through a forwarding form. He noticed that nobody was using steve@next.com, even though several employees were named Steve, and decided to request the alias for himself late one Friday night.

According to the post, the request was approved automatically. What followed was a flood of misdirected email from people who thought they were writing to Steve Jobs. Hayman said the inbox began collecting messages from reporters, CEOs and finance professionals. He said the unintended setup quickly made him panic, because he realised that the alias could have routed important correspondence to the wrong person for some time before anyone noticed.

The blog post says Hayman then corrected the forwarding so that steve@next.com pointed to Jobs’s own address, sjobs@next.com. After that, he wrote to Jobs and explained what had happened. Jobs replied with a short note: “Great idea, thank you.” Hayman said this was the only email he personally received from Jobs, and that he later thought about printing it and framing it.

The account is notable less for the length of the exchange than for what it suggests about the culture around NeXT’s email system. The company’s mail software, Hayman said, supported attachments and multimedia features that looked unusually advanced in 1991. The post describes an internal world in which email addresses, aliases and message forwarding were still the kind of infrastructure details that could produce surprises, even at a company founded by one of the best-known figures in computing.

Hayman also framed the story as a bookend to his career, saying he began with an email from Jobs and ended with one from Tim Cook. That detail turns the post into more than a nostalgic anecdote. It is also a reminder that some of the most consequential figures in technology still depended on simple workplace systems that could be altered by a single form submission.

The broader significance is limited because the piece is a memoir-style blog post rather than an external report, but the underlying facts are straightforward: an alias request went through, misdirected messages followed, the forwarding was corrected, and Jobs answered with two words. The result is a compact window into early 1990s Silicon Valley communication culture and the kind of accidental interaction that can later become a company legend.