@phnt @nyanide @cornfields74 @prettygood SMTP and POP3/IMAP are already abused per se since these days you need email servers to send and receive. There was a time you could send and receive directly from your CLI, before spam became a problem, but you still needed an address at least.

So, no, early emails were a lot closer to chats, and didn't even need a server, nor a client that wasn't an UTF terminal