Could have been worse
I spent years supporting various X.500 email services which were supposed to be far superior to your noddy smtp delivered over uucp. It never went anywhere much though.
I had got used to using email at work and when I saw redundancy coming up I shopped around for some kind of personal email account, which were rare in the 1990s. BT had one, which was X.500, but in addition to a standing charge it cost 40p per message! Luckily Demon tenner-a-month came along just at the right time.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
