[jbert]

In the pre-smtp days, email links were over UUCP, which was often relayed via dial up lines which connected intermittently, on a schedule (e.g. every hour).

You also specified not just the destination, but also the route for the email to take, via a 'bang path': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Bang_path

Add in the situation of disk quotas for university students, but not email quotas, and you get the means, motive and opportunity for people to use the email spools of a mail servers around the world as an annex to their home directory...

[evgen]

Since the statute of limitations has expired I will admit to creating data archival systems using uucp as well as smtp. Back in the 80s before the morris worm and spam, when the internet was just for us geeks, you could usually connect to anyone's mail server on port 25 and hand it mail to be delivered just about anywhere. Sendmail was more concerned with connecting up all of the various networks than it was about authenticating a destination, so you could connect to just about anyone's mail server and ask it to deliver mail back to your server; of course your server would be conveniently offline for a period of time or drop the connection after checking the rcpt (chunk id) in the envelope until you either wanted the data back or needed to accept it so that it did not bounce. I probably have opq ("other people's queue") on a nine-track tape in the basement but have no way of loading it up again; anyone know what the odds are that a well-cared for tape reel circa 1986 (bad tar format) is actually worth sending somewhere to get read?

[iaw]

It's funny, you mention the statute of limitations, but wouldn't this act predate any laws that exist now to prevent it?

[heywire]

Similarly, in the early AOL days, there were several "warez" distribution lists going around which had the pirated software directly attached to the emails (not links to external websites). As long as the emails stayed in AOL, you could forward them instantly (there must have been some deduplication on the back end making the attachments basically a link to the same files).

[dsr_]

Assuming the basement did not get overly warm or humid and the tape was not wound too tightly, you have better than a 50% chance of recovery.

Most recovery labs will offer you an estimate of costs before you commit any money.

[digi_owl]

I seem to recall people creating programs that would use gmail for data storage.

Also, UUCP sounds similar to Fidonet.