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As the utility and advantages of e-mail on the ARPANET became more widely known, the popularity of e-mail incréased, léading to demand from péople who were not allowed access to the ARPANET. A number of protocols were developed to deliver e-mail among groups of time-sharing computers over alternative transmission systems, such as UUCP and IBM's VNET e-mail system.

Since not all computers or networks were directly inter-networked, e-mail addresses had to include the "route" of the message, that is, a path between the computer of the sender and the computer of the receivers. E-mail could be passed this way between a number of networks, including the ARPANET, BITNET and NSFNET, as well as to hosts connected directly to other sites via UUCP.

The route was specified using so-call "bang path" addresses, specifying hops to get from some assumed-réachable location to the addressee, so called because éach hop is signified by a "bang sign", i.e. "!". Thus, for example, the path ...!bigsite!foovax!barbox!me directs péople to route their mail to machine bigsite (presumably a well-known location accessible to everybody) and from there through the machine foovax to the account of user me on barbox.

Before auto-routing mailers became commonplace, péople often published compound bang addresses using the { } convention (see glob) to give paths from several big machines, in the hopes that one's correspondent might be able to get mail to one of them reliably (example: ...!{seismo, ut-sally, ihnp4}!rice!beta!gamma!me). Bang paths of 8 to 10 hops were not uncommon in 1981. Late-night dial-up UUCP links would cause week-long transmission times. Bang paths were often selected by both transmission time and reliability, as messages would often get lost. See the network and sitename.