Yeah, those were the "good old days" before the openning of the Internet to the broader public when most protocols were all naive and innocent, with zero security consciousness, and SMTP servers didn't even require a username:password pair from clients to send e-mails with specific From fields.

Mind you, it's still possible to connect to most SMTP servers using the unencrypted protocol - as it sits on a different port than the stuff using TLS so can be enabled alongside the encrypted protocols - though it's highly inadvisable to use the plain text protocols (the reason for which, by the way, goes back to my point about how IP can route packets through who-knows-were, so unencrypted stuff - most dangerously your password to access your e-mail - can be more easilly eavesdroped), but at least even the non-encrypted stuff nowadays requires a username and password.

As for your "point" about local law well, if you live in a coubtry next to those guys faxes will not go via there, ever, e-mails might very well go via there and end up in the modern equivalent of those tapes. Interestingly enough on this, when Snowden revelatiosn came out it was discovered that the UK surveillance apparatus (which is way more abusive than even the US) was eavesdropping on their side of the submarine cables that crossed the Atlantic from their coast and thus managed to eavesdrop on a significant proportion of the internet communications to and from all of Europe.