Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might not remember this, but that's exactly what originally happened. You had CompuServe mail, and Prodigy mail, and AOL mail, and any number of internal mail systems at different companies. There was not a single mail format or agreed upon address space. Getting mail from one system to another was a huge pain.
Interesting. In fact, I do not remember that. I started using the internet some time in the 90s. I never used Compuserve nor AOL. I never heard about Prodigy.
Toward the end, there were gateways between (almost) all of these systems that worked more or less reliably. You had to keep a text file handy to figure out how to mung an address on network #1 so that it would delivered to network #2.
For instance, a WWIVNet user could send email to foo@bar.com by sending it to foo#bar.com@5XX, where 5xx was a WWIVNet node number in the 500 range (these were reserved for gatewaying purposes). An Internet user could send email to 23@9073 on WWIVNet by sending it to 23-9073@(some site that was running the gateway software).
Similar address rewriting hacks were used for the other networks. Some were pretty straightforward -- I remember CompuServe used addresses roughly like 888,923423. To send mail from the Internet to CompuServe, you just had to change the comma to a period and tack @compuserve.com on the end. Others were pretty arcane.
Probably more than you wanted to know. :-)