No, it's not email. The format looks a bit like email; but it's actually more related to NetNews.

Long, long ago, in a century far away, we programmers had a social network called UseNet. It was transported over the internet when the internet was very young and most of us used dial-up modems at 300bps to connect to friends who had friends who had access to the backbone.

NetNews was transported using the NNTP protocol, and copied from host to host to host. It was our social network, and we used it to debate all manner of topics. We would post articles, and reply to those articles and construct long winded threads of discussion and debate.

UseNet was a distributed and uncensorable network that nobody owned and nobody controlled. It was very much like nostr.

So when I discovered nostr, almost two years ago now, I decided I would create a client that was reminiscent of NetNews in hopes that one day we could resurect those days of censorship free and heady discussions.