> One thing you ought to watch out for is you can’t send out personal message stuff, that’s illegal. That’s against the postal laws and you’ll be in jail in no time.
Is this true, that "postal laws" used to prohibit personal email?
I've heard that interpretation. The US post office has a government-granted monopoly on delivering mail. There was an exception in the original law for "extremely urgent material", which allowed Fedex to come into existence [0]. If Fedex hadn't been tough (and beloved by law firms who needed a lot of overnight delivery) they might well have been sued out of existence by the USPS.
So early users of email tried to be careful to not too obviously use it a replacement for postal mail.
If a few people are doing something illegal, it's a crime. If everyone is doing something illegal, it quickly stops being a crime, or there is widespread outrage when someone is prosecuted.
I once worked for a guy in the early 90's the said to stop fiddling with that UUNET machine... the government's never going to let anyone the Internet for commercial purposes. He genuinely believed it too.
Unlikely as a practical matter. At least we never considered it as something in the 1970s. Commercial activity more broadly was a more significant issue but that was dealt with before it became a broad concern.
Is this true, that "postal laws" used to prohibit personal email?