The traffic was pretty light by today's standards. I was able to "run" half or more of two and a half states' (in the Rocky Mountain region) worth of UUCP/email traffic on a TrailBlazer 9600 baud modem hanging off of a refurbished PDP-11 that took up an uncomfortably large portion of my bedroom. It even kept up with almost all of Usenet, if I didn't have to use my phone line for some other more personally urgent business.
If you were a user sending emails via a terminal session, I could see it as being considered "better", but if you were the sysadmin keeping (say) the Vaxen alive and "fair and balanced", it could be a non-trivial amount of work!
I started out on email about 1984/85, using the 'mail' utility on Unix at school. They rolled out Elm[1] shortly thereafter and it caused something of a sensation.
I do remember one of the profs grousing that "if you can't read your email with 'cat' then you are subscribed to too many email lists."
He might have had a point, but I would not want to respond to an email with cat!
When I worked in Tokyo, all of our SunOS workstations did the BSD Unix thing, and we got corporate email via some sort of X.400 relay over an IBM mainframe (I think). This was before Mutt or Pine and may have been Elm or could have been something else - I don't remember. But, it was weird, because we could just Telnet into our compadre's SunOS boxes in the US directly (dedicated line). I don't know what the rationale behind this "split" was, but whenever we called corporate IT about email being down - they would always say: "What's email?". They must have used a different word for their X.400 batch messaging system.
If you were a user sending emails via a terminal session, I could see it as being considered "better", but if you were the sysadmin keeping (say) the Vaxen alive and "fair and balanced", it could be a non-trivial amount of work!