Comment by btown

Email is one of the very few success cases of the xkcd Standards meme: https://xkcd.com/927/ - and it's due to practicality and ingenuity on the part of people who made very creative parsers and placed real-world understanding behind every word of the early RFCs.

Without a unified email standard, the world would look incredibly different today, especially as it bootstrapped open communication between different countries and institutions in developing every protocol since.