I really see the point in not having to manage a whole big ecosystem by ourselves (I use gitlab, sometimes github). The rant was about using an interface on another website (not the email API) in order to submit a PR or an issue for updating a website. It's a standardized way of doing an edit (and it can be painful when you don't know github), and more and more websites are using it.
oh, i see. i overlooked that. thanks.
A program running on your school's mainframe that you access via some sort of terminal is a computing service from before the Internet.
Plenty of people use a Unix prompt to access both local and remote computers. That its not your preferred method is fine, but there are people out there that prefer it! If those command line tools are hitting the same API (eg using curl), what then?
IMHO, a service is just a program someone else manages running on a server, that I can use remotely with a REST API.
In college, in the 80's, I used the symbolic math program Maple on an MTS mainframe. Is Maple a service? I say no, only because services tend to be web related, they have a REST API accessed with HTTP. But if Maple supported a REST endpoint, bam, its a service.
In this OPs example, the "service" API is email, not HTTP. But it achieves the same goal.
What I think the OP misses is: who the heck wants to log on to the server and tweak the site content from the unix prompt when there is an API?