ftpmail. Now that is outdated. I vaguely remember around 1990 you'd send an email to some peculiar address and in more than an hour but less than a day, the service would execute the commands you gave it and return ... perhaps uuencoded files via email? Some encoding? Text just appeared as text.

I think I got new phrack issues that way. Or some other zine. I also obtained some software this way. Some of it was even FOSS/legal.

It was a way of working around various quota or security limitations. You'd get your file just as well as FTP, merely slowly. There were of course limitations on the ftp-mail service, you couldn't fetch an entire OS distro this way.

Unbelievably, you can still do this today

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/tg/ftpmail_using.php

The docs on that page do bring back some memories. Obviously real ftpmail service didn't have a "open" line it was more like "open [email protected]"

thats what we did for a good time during the first Bush administration with our 2400 baud modems, LOL.