The mail must get through

Whether you're connected to the internet or just use it on a local network, email is one of the most indispensable of business tools. For some people it's the closest they come to the mythical "paperless office", while for others it's just a way to keep in touch with friends and family. And it can also be one of the most irritating things you'll ever install on your computer. Make the wrong choice of email system, and you could live to regret it for a long time. What's now thought of as internet email is actually a collection of many different types of system: some really are connected to the net directly, while others are linked to different types of network such as Fidonet bulletin boards or UUCP networks, via a series of gateways. Others are corporate email systems, some using standard software and others using off-the-shelf packages like cc:Mail to link them up. Whatever sort of system someone's using, chances are you'll be able to send mail to them just by quoting an address in the form user@host.somewhere and let the system take care of the rest. Basic beginnings It hasn't always been that way. While email on the internet itself has long been simple to address, talking to the rest of the world was tricky. And even talking to other people on the net was not as colourful as it is now: the Unix roots of the internet meant that many of the email programs used on the net looked pretty old-fashioned compared to the graphical tools that Windows and Mac users are used to. Email on the internet was designed to transmit text, and it's remained that way until very recently. To be exact, it was designed to transmit American text, with a limited set of characters that precluded accented letters, pound signs and much else. Add the lack of flexible addressing, which made it necessary to specify the route your message might take to reach some recipients, and it's easy to see why it took internet email a comparatively long time to become the de-facto means of communication between businesses and inviduals. Who really wanted to be bothered with addresses like @cunyvms.cuny.edu:online-l@pucc.bitnet, or worse? A few years ago, knowing how to direct mail like that would be essential for many net users. Now it's all hidden, and gateways to systems as diverse as Fidonet and CompuServe can all appear to have an internet address which passes messages on. And within those systems, it's much easier than it was to send mail to the rest of the world. By linking to the internet, online services like CompuServe gave their users the ability to contact people on all the other systems that did the same, and coupled with the number of graduates who became used to the net for communicating at college, people suddenly realised that email was a way you could reach a large number of the people you wanted to contact. When worlds collide While internet email is the glue that links different systems together, it still only really allows the exchange of text-based information. Files can only be sent if they're converted into a format that can be sent as text. Meanwhile, on the departmental LAN, internal email systems have grown and become much more than a way to send a simple text note from one place to another. Even old systems provide fill-in forms for standard office tasks like purchase requests or telephone messages, while the latest mail programs like Microsoft Exchange allow different fonts, colours and drag-and-drop attachments - a far cry from the text-based world of the internet. As you'd expect, when the two try to talk to each other, things start to go wrong - badly in some cases - and what should have been a simple means of exchanging information becomes a nightmare of garbled text and bizarre attachments. All of which, naturally, is completely avoidable. On the internet, there are standards for just about everything, drawn up now by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). In the UNIX world these standards, called RFCs (Request for Comments), are widely used, and complying with them makes it possible for systems to swap messages with very few problems. There are standards that cover just about every aspect of email, from where to send error responses when a message can't be delivered, down to how addresses should be written. For people who are on mailing lists, there are standards that define how a group of mail messages can be wrapped up in a single one, saving on bandwidth and making it easier to handle. Adhering to the standards makes it possible to do things like respond automatically to different types of message, or splitting a digest into its component parts. MIME artistry All that, though, still isn't enough in a world where people want to send files or add other information to their messages. And so MIME was born. It stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, and it's a way that the text-based email of the internet can be used to transfer just about any form of information. MIME allows, for instance, for binary files to be attached to messages, just like on a LAN email system, with descriptive comments and information about the type of information. There are even defined types of information, such as "audio/basic", so that some types of file can be swapped very easily between people with completely different computer systems. You want bold, centred text in your email? Then you should be using MIME's richtext format, which looks a little like HTML and adds extra features to a standard message without completely messing it up for people who don't have a compatible mailer. In fact, the whole of MIME has been designed so that if you don't have a mail program that understands it, you can still make out a lot of what's going on. Perhaps that's why it's been so resolutely ignored and botched by the people who make corporate email systems. In the PC world, standards are something that everyone tries to set, instead of following, and it's the readiness of companies like Microsoft to re-invent other people's wheels that causes most of the problems with sending email on the internet. They're not the only guilty party, of course. Everyone's at it, deciding to do their own thing to preserve the features of their own email system across the internet. That's all very well - if you can do it in a way that works. But if you've ever tried to send a file from your LAN through an internet gateway to someone in another company, chances are you'll have had a thoroughly frustrating time. For instance, there are gateways that will try to open any files that pass through them, and bounce the mail if they can't understand what's in it. And there are some that will subtly alter some of the characters in a uuencoded file attachment so that it can't be unpacked. Perhaps you have a message that's urgent, and your mailer lets you set a "Precedence" option? Beware: while some systems will act on it and put your message to the head of the queue, others will silently delete it if the value isn't one they understand. And how do you know a message has been received? Again, there's no simple way, especially since many LAN gateways don't allow you to add your own internet headers. Even when you do, which headers should you put in? There's Return-Receipt-To:, Acknowledge-To, X-Confirm-Reading-To: and doubtless a few others, some of which will survive gateways and some which won't. Small wonder, then, that the only reliable way to be sure email has arrived is to ring the recipient and ask them, or make sure that every message receives an automatic reply. But where do you send the reply? To the address in the "From:" field, or perhaps to the Reply-To: address, or should it go to the "envelope" address, which may be different. In practice, you won't be given a choice. Even large companies like CompuServe seem able to blissfully ignore some of those addresses, directing errors back to the wrong place - potentially disastrous on mailing lists, where an error sent back to the list will generate another error and so on. Few of the PC mail programs used for internet email by the man in the street offer any options for automatic responses at all, let alone the flexibility found in the longer established world of internet email. For all that they look old and clunky, the tools that people have been using on the internet for years, first with text-based mail and now with MIME attachments, are actually far more sophisticated than many of the systems that large companies use to link their LANs to the rest of the world. It may be unfashionable to look at the way people have done things in the past, but if email is to become useful and reliable, the people who offer to link you to the internet should concentrate less on re-inventing the wheel and more on making existing ones turn smoothly. There are already millions of people using a mail system that works and, with technologies like MIME, can offer everything that email needs to, without tying you to a single mail program or gateway. Communication is the name of the game; but wouldn't it be much easier if everyone talked the same language? The future of email Email is growing. Although the pretty face of the internet is the web, email is far more useful to most people and, for many of them, an indispensable tool. That internet email is viewed as important is evidenced by the fact that companies like Microsoft now provide an internet mail program that works in a rather better way than their first attempt, which used Exchange to talk to the rest of the world, resulting in a slew of messages around the internet with bizarre attachments in "ms/tnef" format, clogging up mailing lists with data that was only useful to other Exchange users. NetScape's Navigator includes a basic mail program, and no corporate email system worth its salt would be seen without a gateway to the internet via SMTP or UUCP, and at least some rudimentary way of handling MIME attachments. As people wake up to the problems caused by misbehaving gateways that mangle and lose messages, expect companies to work harder to comply with established standards. All of that, though, is not quite enough. Sending mail on the internet can still be plagued with problems, including bizarre error responses to your messages. Just what does "554 Service unavailable" really mean? At the moment there's no set standard for the format of error messages on the internet. That's set to change soon, with draft proposals already available. It may seem like a trivial idea, but it's potentially one of the most significant changes for people who rely on email. If error messages have a standard format, your email program can turn that "554 Service unavailable" into something more useful and work out what to do next, whether it's telling you in plain English or just sending a second copy of the note automatically. Other areas where improvements can be expected are the interface to mail programs, bringing some of the power of traditional email systems to the desktop, with powerful tools for searching and organising your messages. Some LAN mail systems can already do this, but they'll often fall down when presented with the finer details of internet mail. Windows 95 and MacOS have already taken a step towards making email more useful, with a single mailbox that can be used for internet, LAN and fax messages, via Exchange and PowerTalk respectively. But it's still not as simple as it should be to send a message to its ultimate destination, and you'll often have to choose what sort of note it is. Better address books and systems for managing mail should improve that in future. And for your incoming messages, agent-based technology offers the potential to help make sense of the mountain of email that busy people receive. Based on systems similar to Autonomy's AgentWare, these will allow you to sort messages based on an intelligent look at their contents, instead of just scanning for a single phrase in the text or the subject. So what the future holds for email is simple: standards, to make sure that you really can exchange different types of messages with people; simplification, to make it easier to know what you're doing and what's gone wrong; and sorting, to help find the messages that matter and hold back the tidal wave of junk. Building a better email system. If you want to build an email system that works, where do you start? And what sort of features should you be looking at? The most important thing to consider is what you want to use your email for. Is it primarily for communicating with the outside world, or for exchanging information with other colleagues in the office? Do you want to be able to track the use of resources via a central scheduler, or provide people with simple message templates for common tasks? Just how easy do you want it to be for people to send messages to the internet? All those questions are going to have some bearing on the type of email system you choose, and bear in mind that if you decide after a while to swap to a different system, you could be in for a massive upheaval. You'll often be often unable to access messages that were received with an old program. There's unfortunately no such a thing as a completely infallible email system, but there are things you do to make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible, and those too are important considerations when you're connecting everything up. To an extent, you may find that the choice of LAN email system has been made for you when your network was installed, leaving you with a system like MS Mail or Novell MHS already up and running, with just a question mark over how to integrate it into the rest of the world. Fortunately, where there used to be only a few ways to connect a system like MS Mail or MHS to the internet, there are now dozens, and you can choose the solution that best suits your needs, from a dial-up gateway system like TFS to a post office server designed to sit on the end of a leased line connection to the internet. Whichever you choose, it's important to find out exactly what functions are supported; can you, for example, arrange for attachments on LAN mail messages to be automatically converted to MIME format, and for the same thing to happen in reverse when a message is received from the internet? And what happens with some of the advanced MIME features, like large "multipart" files that are split over several messages. If a gateway program won't handle MIME attachments, avoid it. There are other ways of sending files over the Internet, but MIME is the standard, and it's what you should be using if you want to be sure of exchanging data safely with other people. Check too to find out what happens with the different addresses on internet mail when it reaches your system. Some MS Mail gateways offer users the "envelope" address instead of the Reply-Address. That might sound trivial, but it can make it impossible to reply to people. It's a little like the letters that come from your bank, where the address on the back of the envelope is the bank's central mail room, but you really need to send your reply to your own branch, at the address on the letter. If a mail gateway can't make this distinction, it's broken. Not only will you have problems sending mail to some people, but error messages are likely to be sent back to the wrong place as well. Of course, few vendors of email gateways are going to readily admit to the sort of problems their software can cause. A good place to look for advice is a newsgroup like comp.mail.misc where you can swap experiences with other people. You should also make it clear that you are looking for a mail gateway that supports MIME and complies with the internet RFCs for sending and receiving mail. Technical gripes aside, other ways to make email more efficient include the use of auto-response systems, especially for addresses that appear in information such as sales brochures. Make sure that important addresses generate an automatic response, so that everyone who writes knows straight away that their message has been received, and whether or not they can expect a personal reply. Email filtering is also an essential tool, and here it can help to make sure that gateways to the internet can support more than one address for each user, or lists of users. For instance, "sales" could be an address that sends messages to more than one person, while "online-l" could be the address at which a user subscribes to the Online-L mailing list. By ensuring that mail on different topics is routed to different addresses - even if it's all ultimately for the same user - it becomes much easier to put messages in appropriate folders, making sure that important messages aren't lost beneath a pile of junk mail, press releases or invitations to dinner. This may seem like a lot of different things to consider when all you really want to do is to send a message from one person to another, but remember that messages are a lot more than just the text of old. If you want to be able to reliably swap data, DTP files, pictures, sound and anything else, you need a reliable email system, and you need one that won't talk gibberish when it comes into contact with the outside world.