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Thanks for your understanding!
Sincerely, Charles Kozierok
Author and Publisher, The TCP/IP Guide
When the students at Duke University decided to create their online community, electronic mail was already in wide use, and there were many mailing lists in operation as well. E-mail was usually transported using UUCP during these pre-Internet days, the same method that Usenet was designed to employ. The obvious question then was, why not simply use e-mail to communicate between sites?
The main reason is that e-mail is not really designed to facilitate the creation of an online community where information can be easily shared in a group. The main issue with e-mail in this respect is that only the individuals who are specified as recipients of a message can read it. There is no facility whereby someone can write a message and put it in an open place where anybody who wants can read it, analogous to posting a newsletter in a public place.
Another problem with e-mail in large groups is related to efficiency: if you put 1,000 people on a mailing list, each message sent to that list must be duplicated and delivered 1,000 times. Early networks were limited in bandwidth and resources; using e-mail for wide-scale group communication was possible, but far from ideal.
Key Concept: While electronic mail can be used for group communications, it has two important limitations. First, a message must be specifically addressed to each recipient, making public messaging impossible. Second, each recipient requires delivery of a separate copy of the message, so sending a message to many recipients means the use of a large amount of resources.
To avoid the problems of using e-mail for group messaging, Usenet was designed using a rather different communication and message-handling model than e-mail. The defining difference between the Usenet communication model and that used for e-mail is that Usenet message handling is oriented around the concept of public distribution, rather than private delivery to an individual user. This affects every aspect of how Usenet communication works: