If its not worth starting an Internet provider, would it be more beneficial to activate a local BBS and offer email access? How would I go about doing that?
With a BBS all you need is a computer and some phone lines. You don’t have “real” Internet access, but you can get e-mail and news. The “gotcha” is that mail gets queued until the BBS dials in to the Internet. The simplest way to establish a e-mail linked BBS is to treat it as an end node in the Internet, connected via a modem link. The “traditional” way to do this used a protocol suite called UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy), which has been ported to MS-DOS, incidentally. UUCP design is for a network of store-and-forward systems, all interconnected via periodic (and hopefully local) phone calls. A decade ago, UUCP was the core protocol in the USENET, which supported e-mail and news. The USENET core nodes migrated to Internet technology, TCP/IP-based protocols were developed to transport both email and news, and USENET “just faded away”. UUCP is still in use in lieu of POP/IMAP in some locales. The contemporary approach to building an e-mail-linked BBS would be to register it in the DNS either
