The Rise of Electronic Messaging
The Rise of Electronic Messaging
It’s hard to imagine a world without email, probably because the technology has so quickly insinuated itself into everyday life. This year, an estimated 1.4 trillion email messages will be sent worldwide (Figure 1). By 2002, more than half of the men, women and children in the U.S. are expected to regularly use email.
The Roots of Electronic Messaging
Despite its ubiquity, email is a relatively recent communications phenomenon. Electronic messaging has its roots in the early days of the ARPANET, which later became known as the Internet. In the late 60s, researchers developed a way to send short, static, text-based messages to one or more recipients within the same Local Area Network (LAN). These systems were proprietary in nature and didn’t allow for communications outside of the local network. It wasn’t until the early 80s, when so-called “time-share messaging” services such as MCIMail, EasyLink and TeleMail were introduced, that email could link wide-area users. Still, these systems were proprietary, required special software, and -involved user interfaces that were anything but user-friendly.
The next evolution of electronic messaging came a few years later with the emergence of proprietary closed email solutions like Microsoft Mail and Lotus cc:mail. From these soon developed a newer generation of groupware applications like Lotus Notes and MS Exchange, which added functionality and evolved to support Internet standards. Using these applications, colleagues in far-flung locations could send email and also share information, such as files, documents and calendars. However, the systems were still proprietary and therefore not accessible by others without the same software and access privileges.
Meanwhile, the fledgling Internet — still primarily a tool for scientists and researchers — began to adopt messaging standards that allowed communications between and among proprietary networks. Standards such as Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) and Post Office Protocol (POP) were created and incorporated into the Internet, as well as integrated into other messaging platforms based on client-server technology.
With the foundation laid for open, unfettered, inter-network messaging, it only took the -creation of the World Wide Web and the rapid spread of the Internet in the mid-90s to position electronic messaging as a central business and personal communications tool. The popularity of email in home and business has grown as the Internet has expanded. That trend is expected to continue, since the growth in the number of people and devices connected to the Internet shows no signs of letting up. The community of Internet users worldwide is projected to grow from 97 million in 1998 to 331 million in 2001 and the number of Internet-enabled devices is expected to reach 2.1 million by 2002. Further enhancing the role of electronic messaging in the coming months is an ongoing convergence around Internet Protocol (IP) networking that promises to broaden the definition of what kind of information can be carried in an electronic message.
The Messaging Convergence
Voice and data technologies are currently evolving toward a common platform that leverages the IP underpinnings of electronic messaging. This convergence is taking place in three arenas: telephony, mass media and messaging platforms. Telecommunications -carriers are beginning to migrate their voice telephone traffic — which until now was carried on traditional circuit-switched networks like the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) — to the same IP networks that handle their data traffic. This more -efficient merging of voice and data traffic means that new applications are being -developed to make no distinction between types of traffic. Internet messages, therefore, will increasingly carry text, voice and multimedia content.
The second area of convergence can be found in mass media. Entertainment is gravitating toward the Internet at warp speed as media companies gobble up Internet companies. Witness the recent agreements between NBC and Snap, and between Disney and InfoSeek. As new-media companies like these develop their content for a variety of uses, digital entertainment will become available on TV sets, computer screens and hybrid devices that treat digital programming as nothing more than video or audio messages.
A similar convergence is happening across messaging platforms. Faxes, pages, voice mail and email are traditionally handled by separate messaging systems. Emerging standards will soon allow these platforms to merge and offer true interoperability. For example, the new Voice Profile for Internet Mail (VPIM) and the Fax Profile for Internet Mail (FPIM) standards enable SMTP-based email to transport voice mail and faxes. In such an IP environment, a voice mail message becomes an audio attachment to an email, and a fax becomes merely an image attachment to an email. In short, the next-generation email “inbox” will manage all kinds of text, audio, image and video messages.
More Devices, More Support
It’s not only the content that’s changing — the devices that generate the messages are changing as well. Marketers of wireless phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), pagers and television set-top boxes are already integrating Web-based mail clients into their products. Messages will thus emanate not only from PCs, but from any number of communications devices available in the office, at home and on the road.
For the IT professionals who have to manage their companies’ messaging systems, the implications of these three areas of convergence are clear: there will be significantly more messages to handle; the increasing multimedia nature of these messages will require more bandwidth, more storage capacity and more scalable support systems; and maintaining an in-house messaging system will be more costly in terms of both money and effort