During the 1980s, many commercial electronic mail systems were devised, implemented, and sold to the growing number of commercial computer networks. These networks typically were comprised of personal computers and/or Unix workstations. Mainframe users also had electronic mail, with access restricted to those with accounts on the mainframe.

Email systems have been sold by Lotus (both cc:Mail and Lotus Notes), IBM itself, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Digital Equipment Corporation, and many others for use on 1980s-style networks. All of these systems had some commonalities: They were highly proprietary, were centrally managed, initially provided LAN-oriented messaging capabilities, and all tried to out-feature the competition. Scalability was and is often an issue.

Because these products were commercial in nature, each tended naturally toward that ultimate expression of capitalism, monopoly. They tended to be tightly integrated with other products from the same parent company, such as office suites, time trackers, contact managers, etc. Over time, many of these products have become absorbed into larger offerings, such as the email functionality within groupware products.

Of all the proprietary mail systems, Microsoft’s has gained popularity by virtue of wide deployment. Microsoft’s mail client is shipped bundled with its operating systems and hence is sold with most new personal computers. Because of this easy availability, many businesses use Microsoft’s system. The Microsoft Messaging API (MAPl) is not covered in this book since it is a proprietary mail system. It is my view that the very nature of messaging suggests adherence to open standards for the benefit of all.

Commercial email systems offer many short-term, or tactical, advantages. They tend to be easy to install. Indeed, there is often a Single, packaged product to install. Technical support is provided and sometimes included in the purchase price. For managers, there is a single, easily identified vendor to blame when things go wrong. Additionally, many such systems are easy to centrally manage, allowing the use of less seasoned systems administrators.

These advantages are offset by a simple list of long-term, or strategic, disadvantages. Proprietary mail systems are just that: proprietary. That implies that they do not play well with others. Indeed, many of these systems now make gateways available to translate messages into Internet, X.400, or other format, generally for an additional price. The functionality of these gateways varies. This proprietary nature affects many companies for the worst following growth, merger, or connection to the Internet.

Another Significant disadvantage to proprietary systems is that they were generally designed for LAN use. The advantage of central management turns into a disadvantage when many thousands of users are present. Management becomes a bottleneck.

The late 1990s has resulted in (among a few other things) some commercial products that either gateway well to the Internet mail system or are native to it. Netscape Mail Server (now Messaging Server) was one early example, although there are now others.

Since it would be impossible for commercial companies to justify the expense involved in creating gateways to each others’ mail systems, a common message form was needed. If a single, canonical, message form could be agreed upon, vendors need only provide a gateway capable of translating their message formats to it. Until the early 1990s, most vendors assumed that the canonical form would turn out to be the international standard, X.400. The explosive growth of the Internet stopped this process by thrusting upon the world a common network that had a mail system in place but no X.400 implementations to speak of. The Internet’s Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), as amended by the Multipart Internet Mail Extensions (MIME), became the world’s canonical messaging standard by default. All vendors of proprietary mail systems have been forced by the growth of the Internet to provide or improve their Internet gateways.