Oh man, email. Fun story - I started using the internet around 2000, maybe 2001 and to me email was always a website. Like hotmail etc. The first time I install

Oh man, email. Fun story - I started using the internet around 2000, maybe 2001 and to me email was always a website. Like hotmail etc. The first time I installed Linux I was very confused why it wanted my email address and most importantly why the basic default configuration installed an email server. I'm not setting up a hotmail competitor, why is there an email server installed? It took me almost a decade before I found out that email used to be on your machine and it would simply accept email from anywhere. You used to be able to just connect to any email server and go "here, have some mail" and it would accept it - no questions asked, no authentication needed. Even knowing it was meant for university-to-university mail exchange originally, it still sounds completely insane. Then again, unsecured ftp used to also be a thing. To this day I have no idea what to do when I log into a Linux machine and see "You have mail in /var/spool/mail/<you>". It probably doesn't matter anymore.