Previous Table of Contents Next


Chapter 35
Popular E-mail Systems

Gary Cannon

The commercial E-mail industry continues to grow at an impressive rate. There are almost 91 million E-mail users around the world. This chapter discusses what features and services to look for when shopping for a corporate E-mail system, and compares the leading E-mail systems on the market.

INTRODUCTION

The Internet has grown so rapidly because of users’ need to communicate and share information. Although many people were doing just that on commercial networks, the Internet offers more than just E-mail and is less expensive than commercial systems.

The number of E-mail users has grown almost 74% in the past year. More than 47 million people are using LAN E-mail systems, most of which are connected to commercial services. The larger commercial networks cannot accurately estimate how many individual users they support because most users on LANs and larger systems do not have individual accounts on the commercial networks. The majority of users access the commercial systems through corporate gateways.

This number of users continues to grow, and as commercial systems enhance their product and service offerings, there will be continued expansion on the commercial side of the market as well as the Internet.

Many business users rely on E-mail to conduct their day-to-day functions. E-mail ties together many other applications and has contributed significantly to the information explosion.

ELECTRONIC MESSAGING: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

For years, telex served as the only form of electronic mail and was strictly the domain of government agencies and big business. About 25 years ago a few operating systems had rudimentary messaging capabilities. IBM Corp.’s Virtual Machine (VM) system could communicate between active terminals. Digital Equipment Corp.’s Virtual Memory System (VMS) operating system came up with the basics of what would become VMSmail.

At about the same time, General Electric’s Information Services Business Division (ISBD) developed the time-sharing concept with Dartmouth University and introduced an internal system known as Cross File (XFL), which allowed employees to send messages to one another when they were working on projects together. XFL developed into a divisionwide utility and each office had an address. Originally, senders wrote out their message on a piece of paper and handed it to the administrator. Sometime during the day the message would be entered into the system and the sender could expect a reply in a day or so. Functionally, the system worked fine. Practically, it took a few years before the organization fully accepted the application and integrated it fully into daily operation.

Over the next few years, more users would get addresses and access to the system directly via asynchronous terminals. Message traffic started to increase and ISBD offered the XFL system to other GE divisions.

Electronic mail was referred to as message switching then, which was a regulated application under the law in the U.S. and would remain so until January 1981, when it was deregulated and computer service companies entered into the E-mail market. A new commercial application was born and several companies jumped into the market, some as service providers and others as the software developers. E-mail as an industry continued to grow steadily until someone discovered the Internet — now almost everyone has an E-mail address.

PRIMARY ELECTRONIC MESSAGING SYSTEM CATEGORIES

Today there are four primary categories of E-mail systems and users:

  Online services. A relatively small number of services provide E-mail to a large number of users. Examples include CompuServe, America Online, and Prodigy. There are an estimated 12 million users of these services worldwide.
  Commercial services. These are traditional computer service companies with mostly corporate clients providing connectivity between companies. Examples include ATT, GE Information Services (GEIS), MCI, and Sprint. There are an estimated 1.5 million users of these services worldwide.
  Private E-mail. These E-mail systems are proprietary to companies and large organizations and are maintained and operated by them. Examples include General Motors, Pfizer, and J.C Penney. There are an estimated 70 million users of these services worldwide.
  The Internet. An estimated 35 million users worldwide use Internet E-mail.

FEATURES AND FUNCTIONS

When selecting what features an E-mail system should have, the IS department must keep the users in mind. The E-mail system must serve the users. Reliability and maintenance are also critical. There is no 800 number to call if something goes wrong with the LAN server. The LAN is a proprietary system that has to be repaired in-house. As user communities within companies expand, so does the reliability and service problem. As a company grows, so does its local networks, and soon IS and the network staff are maintaining a worldwide collection of them.

Network managers must also be concerned with connectivity. E-mail users, if they do not already, may soon need to communicate with people outside their immediate community. All the popular E-mail systems today have gateways.

X.400 and SMTP

X.400 is the international standard for interconnecting unlike messaging systems. The X.400 recommendations were developed and continue to be upgraded by the Telecommunications Standardization Sector of the International Telecommunications Union, an organization charted by the United Nations that represents most of the countries with modern telephone systems. Almost every E-mail vendor offers X.400 software to connect its system to the commercial world. The software is still expensive, but it is reliable and fast, handles attached files well, and offers excellent security. It does, however, have a slight problem with addressing.

Most E-mail system vendors now offer simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) gateways with their products to connect to the Internet. SMTP is reliable, almost as fast as X.400, does an acceptable job with binary files, has its own addressing problems, and is inexpensive. There is still the directory problem.

The commercial service world also offers proprietary gateways for many private E-mail systems to their public services, which gives the corporate user a window to the E-mail world. For many private E-mail system clients who do not yet need X.400 software, the commercial services offer a gateway to the X.400 world. All of them also provide gateway services to the Internet.

X.500 Directory Service

All of this connectivity introduces the most serious problem in E-mail today — addressing and directories. Worldwide connectivity does no good if there is no map for getting around.

X.500 is E-mail’s atlas. It can interconnect distributed directories, but it is still waiting in the wings. The North American Directory Forum (NADF) has been showing a demo of interconnected X.500 for two years. Commercial service providers are trying to lure corporate clients into using X.500. Some large companies are even experimenting with their own in-house X.500 systems. Because there are still concerns about privacy and security with X.500, many companies are investigating alternatives. This brings additional pressures on the E-mail system vendors to define and offer competent directory services. Companies such as Hitachi are, in addition, introducing directory synchronization products such as SyncWare.


Previous Table of Contents Next

Copyright © CRC Press LLC