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The magic for me, to this day in fact, is knowing that mail is essentially anyone on the internet being allowed to write to a mail servers disk.

There are rules now, but the concept is still almost intact, random people writing to the servers disk - to be later read by someone

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It used to be even more literally so - network mail started off as using FTP to SNDMSG onto a remote system instead of your own. In RFC475, FTP has MAIL and MLFL (mailfile) commands to support this.

I think it's neat that you can still find echoes of this. MAIL worked by just appending to MLFL, separating records with CRLF.CRLF - which is still how Data segments are terminated in SMTP.

Was that before or after UUCP? I know that UUCP carried a command in each message, so you would specify a message body with a tag that says pass it to the mail receiving peogram.

SNDMSG-over-ftp pre-dates UUCP by 5 years, so I think that one's pretty clear-cut.

(Not that I'm claiming anything's original here, ftp & smtp are both in the nwg/ietf family tree, which makes it easy to draw parallels. There's probably 100 other influences.)

This generalises to NNTP, in which anyone writes to everyone and is read by no-one.

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