Microsoft Mail

~ the goodbye ~

by the time i had email at home, microsoft mail was already gone. exchange server 4.0 had absorbed it in june 1996, two years before i first dialed into the internet on a 33.6k modem in ankara. ms mail belonged to an earlier internet, the one that was actually a corporate lan with novell and banyan competing for the file-and-print layer underneath.

the product itself began as a mac application in 1988, built around appletalk on the local network. microsoft brought it to the pc as ms mail for pc networks 2.1 in 1991. windows and os/2 clients followed across the next five years, and version 3.5 was the final release before exchange server 4.0 took over on 11 june 1996.

none of this had anything to do with the public internet yet. ms mail talked to itself over a shared file-server post office, with users connecting through a desktop client that polled the post-office mailbag every few minutes. internet smtp gateways existed but as add-ons.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

ms mail was the workgroup-scale mail system for offices that had a netware or windows file server. the post office was a directory tree on a network share. each user had a sub-folder, and the client read and wrote messages by hitting the share directly. there was no separate mail server process, the file system was the database.

this design made it cheap to deploy. it also made it slow as soon as the user count went past a few dozen and notoriously brittle if anyone ever messed with the directory permissions. version 3.5 added schedule+ integration and the global address book, which moved some load to a separate dispatcher process. it still kept the shared-folder architecture underneath.

~ how it actually ended ~

exchange server 4.0 shipped on 11 june 1996 with a proper mail server process and a jet database. existing ms mail post offices could be migrated through a wizard. the outlook 97 client absorbed the mac and pc client side a year later. by 1998 most lan-based offices that had run ms mail were on exchange.

~ the day it died ~

there was no parade. microsoft simply stopped selling ms mail server licenses. patches continued for a few more years on workgroups deployments that had not migrated, until the version 3.5 binaries quietly faded out of windows. by the time outlook 2000 was out, ms mail was a historical note in the exchange deployment guide.

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