I want to say it was dovecot but that really wasn’t available until later in 2002, so maybe UW IMAP? Cyrus was pretty big at the time but renown for being difficult to set up. I believe the SMTP server was postfix but I can’t remember what the IMAP server was. When I started maintaining OpenNMS in 2002 I had a server at Rackspace that I was able to configure for mail. I didn’t have my own domain until two years later, in 1998, and I believe my friend Ben was the one to host my e-mail at the time. That message from 1996 was off of my employer’s system. I used e-mail for over a decade before then, on school Unix systems and on BBS’s, but it wasn’t until the rise of IMAP in the 1990s that I was able to easily keep and move my messages from provider to provider.

I just went and looked, and the oldest e-mail currently in my system is from July of 1996.

I know for many it is a bane, which has resulted in the rise of “ inbox zero” and even the “ #noemail” movement, but for me it is a great way to communicate.

Imap smtp protonmail