Keep in mind that in ye olden days, email was not a worldwide communication method. It was more typical for it to be an internal-only mail system, running on whatever legacy mainframe your org had, and working within whatever constraints that forced. So in the 90s when the internet began to expand, and email to external organizations became a bigger thing, you were just as concerned with compatibility with all those legacy terminal-based mail programs, which led to different choices when engineering the systems.

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liveoneggs 5 hours ago | parent [-]

This is incorrect

	▲	kstrauser an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Are you certain? Not OP, but a huge chunk of early RFCs was about how to let giant IBM systems talk to everyone else, specifying everything from character sets (nearly universally “7-bit ASCII”) to end of line/message characters. Otherwise, IBM would’ve tried to make EBCDIC the default for everything. For instance, consider FTP’s text mode, which was primarily a way to accidentally corrupt your download when you forgot to type “bin” first, but was also handy for getting human readable files from one incompatible system to another.