Microsoft Mail

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Microsoft Mail (or MSMail) was an early e-mail product, originally for the Apple Macintosh, and later Microsoft Windows based machines as well. Its main competitors on the Mac were QuickMail and FirstClass, and on the PC side, cc:Mail from Lotus. A stripped-down version of the PC-based server, Microsoft Mail for PC Networks, was included in Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. The last version was 3.5 as it was replaced by Microsoft Exchange Server (which starts with version 4.0). The Mac version, then known as Microsoft Mail for AppleTalk Networks, had earlier been sold off to become Star Nine Mail, and has long since been discontinued.

The client software was also named Microsoft Mail and was included in some older versions of Microsoft Office such as version 4.x. The original "Inbox" (Exchange client or Windows Messaging) of Windows 95 also had the capability to connect to MS Mail server. Later, they were replaced with the much more powerful Microsoft Exchange and later Outlook (Windows) and Entourage (Mac).

Microsoft Mail was a shared-file mail system, the "postoffice" was a database of files. Clients used mapped network drives and file sharing to write mail to the postoffice. Clients were in effect Message Transfer Agents (MTAs) for their own postoffices. Mail that needed to travel between postoffices required an external MTA. This MTA was called External.exe and ran on MS-DOS or Windows NT. A multitasking MTA was added with Microsoft Mail for PC Networks 3.5. This ran in the OS/2 subsystem of Windows NT and Windows 2000.

Connections to other email systems were made possible by gateways to "foreign mail systems". There were gateways to PROFS and SNADS (Office Vision), SMTP, X.400, Novell MHS, MCI Mail and others were created by Microsoft.

Many companies running these gateways quickly replaced them with Microsoft Exchange Server connectors. In particular an early part of a migration from MSMail to Exchange included replacing the Microsoft Mail for PC Networks Gateway to SMTP to the Microsoft Exchange Internet Mail Connected, later renamed to the Microsoft Exchange Internet Mail Service.

[edit] Limitations of Microsoft Mail for PC Networks

A single postoffice was locked to a limit of 500 mailboxes. This meant a large enterprise would require many postoffices and many MTAs to connect these postoffices. Also, the Microsoft Mail Client for Windows used an MMF file to store messages, they were downloaded off the postoffice. Because of the file lock and the way they were accessed a user could only login to their mail from a single PC at a time. This made using MSMail across multiple machines problematic.

For enterprises one of the most frustrating experiences of running an Microsoft Mail for PC Networks environment was the method of synchronizing directories (Global Address Books). Every postoffice had a separate Global Address List and these were synchronized using MSMail 3.X directory synchronization protocol and software called dispatch.exe. This process would only run once per day thus in a large enterprise it was somewhat common to have new users take multiple days to replicate to all of the global address lists in the enterprise.

These limitations led to the development of Microsoft Exchange Server.

[edit] Trivia

Microsoft Mail for PC Networks was not deployed as the messaging system at Microsoft. Microsoft ran an MSMail front end on the clients and an MS XENIX based back end. This was a source of embarrassment for Microsoft when it was revealed to the public. This led Microsoft to have Exchange Server be a "dog food" product from before the release of the first version, Microsoft Exchange Server 4.0.