Even with my corporate e-mail connection to the Net, by the mid-1990s I had been using UUCP at home to send and receive Internet e-mail for over five years. UUCP would dial up between my OpenVMS server and UNIX to copy batches of e-mail to and from Linux, UNIX, and other BBS servers until the messages found themselves on a machine they were destined for or were connected to the real Internet! While real Internet gateways were expensive, UUCP systems were free. The catch was that UUCP nodes might have 20 or more hops to find a gateway to the Internet. My worst time sending mail was a little over eight hours from home to my DEC corporate mailbox; my best time was little over 15 minutes before I switched over to a permanent, instantaneous e-mail connection in 1997.

Today, with e-mail accounts free on the Net and dial-up access costing less then $10 per month for people with a PC, most folks consider this type of e-mail quaint and old-fashioned. While the usefulness of UUCP mail has ebbed, it's interesting to note that the protocol still is used in ham radio (packet/system-to-system) e-mail and other places around the world where Internet dial-up (POTS plain old telephone service) is still not easily obtained.