Read the first line of his description again:

"The following is the 500-mile email story in the form it originally appeared, in a post to sage-members on Sun, 24 Nov 2002."

The story appeared on the SAGE mailing list in 2002. It actually takes place between 1994 to 1997.

http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html

Exactly. In 1994, I was in the same town as my mail server. Since these were emails from professors, probably to other academic types, many of them probably used their school's servers, which would have been local.