Those were the days. I still remember my fido number. And I still remember just how painful it was to get uucp working properly. Ugh. But my mother had an email address years before any of her contemporaries. Being a geek was fun then.
I also used uucp for a few years though it soon got replaced with full internet. We were bit behind in Europe and we caught up fast. In the beginning I also had to use bang paths to avoid some misconfiguration upstream. Fido was actually better at this and the tool chain much more user-friendly. Though you still needed multiple. There was one to do the dial up and one to sort the retrieved mail, a "tosser" :)
Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email
If that’s too much, think of the internet as a series of tubes, and email as a digital boomerang that returns with an out-of-office reply attached.