bpa wrote: > A long time ago - a email standard was created X.400 - it had built in > standardised (i.e. not vendor specific) authentication, encrytpion and > nonrepudiation. It has all the facilities that people need now but > vendors saw a system that would compete against their Outlook/Lotus > Notes/cc:mail etc. so the vendors X.400 implementations (required by > govts) were slow, clunky and cumbersome and vendors "persuaded" > companies & people to use their proprietary systems by making sure their > systems were quick, slick and flashy.
As somebody who was heavily involved in that specific aspect of the 'Protocol Wars' (http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/osi-the-internet-that-wasnt), I have to pick some nits. Outlook/Notes/cc:mail are mail clients, not full-blown Message Handling Systems. They did not compete with X.400. X.400 was a very complicated standard, and part of the OSI (Open Systems Interconnect) standard. And as with most ISO/ITU standards, it was designed by committee, had to be everything for everyone, and had lots of non-compatible "profiles". What killed ISO/OSI (and X.400 as part of it) was TCP/IP and the Internet application protocols - in the case of email, it was SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). Although proprietary systems (such as Microsoft Exchange and IBM Notes) and webmail systems (such as Outlook.com, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail) use their own non-standard protocols to access mail box accounts on their own mail servers, all use SMTP when sending or receiving email from outside their own systems. The open Internet "standards", as defined by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), are not formal standards in the sense of the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), but instead, in the spirit of "rough consensus and running code", are only recommendations that the vendors and community can use, or not, as they see fit. Fortunately many of them have been widely adopted - otherwise we wouldn't be able to share these ramblings :) There are a bunch of applicable IETF protocols under the mmusic (Multiparty Multimedia Session Control) and RTSP (Real-Time Streaming Protocol) umbrellas, but they don't go high enough into the actual application layer. "To try to judge the real from the false will always be hard. In this fast-growing art of 'high fidelity' the quackery will bear a solid gilt edge that will fool many people" - Paul W Klipsch, 1953 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Julf's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=42050 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=104383 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
