Windows Messaging
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Windows Messaging | |
 Windows Messaging running on Windows NT 4.0. |
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| Developer: | Microsoft |
|---|---|
| Latest release: | 4.00.835.1374 (version 5.0) / October 14, 1996 |
| OS: | Microsoft Windows |
| Use: | E-mail client |
| License: | Proprietary EULA |
| Website: | Exchange update for Windows 95 |
Windows Messaging, initially called Microsoft Exchange, was an e-mail client included with Windows 95, 98 and Windows NT 4.0.
Contents |
[edit] History
Microsoft Exchange gained wider usage with the release of Windows 95, as this was the only e-mail client that came bundled with it. Exchange was included throughout later releases of Windows up until the intial release of Windows 98, which by then also included Outlook Express 4.0.
- In 1996, Microsoft Exchange was renamed Windows Messaging, because of Microsoft's release of another Exchange product, which was meant for servers.
- Windows Messaging had two branches of successors:
- In software bundled with Windows itself, these were Internet Mail and News in Windows 95, which was succeeded by Outlook Express 4.0 in Windows 98 (bundled with Internet Explorer 4.0 in Windows 95) and throughout newer Windows systems. These did not use the .pst file type.
- Microsoft Outlook became the professional-grade successor of MS Exchange, which still uses the .pst file type.
[edit] Notable features
Unlike Netscape 3's Mail component at the time, Exchange offered some of the following:
- E-mail profiles;
- Password-protected mailbox files.
- This was handy, as Windows 95 was not released as a multi-user operating system: Many users mostly shared a single Windows profile and creating different profiles was very unintuitive. Programs' settings were also shared between Windows user profiles and it was therefore easy to access data created by different users, unless they specifically encrypted or archived their data with different programs.
- While Exchange was not equipped with any special features against viruses that spread through e-mail, no attachment could be viewed or opened automatically (unlike in Microsoft Outlook), so e-mail with a virus was delievered, but the attachment containing the virus needed to be opened (by way of a double-click) and/or saved by the user first.
- Fax integration: built-in Send-and-Receive Fax capability; sent and received faxes were stored in the same .pst file as other messages, first attempt of unified messaging by Microsoft; also the ability to share fax device over network (not available in later versions of Windows)
Users connected through dialup were blessed with the following features:
- Writing e-mail offline and then later sending them while checking for mail.
- The Remote Mail feature allowed checking e-mail by only downloading mail headers (at the same time sending mail waiting in Outbox) and after that they could select to copy or wholly download messages they wished to view or delete unnecessary messages. This feature was later incorporated into Microsoft Outlook.
[edit] Criticisms
- Because Microsoft Outlook used the same basic Windows Messaging profile, account and e-mail settings, MS Exchange users not familiar with it could have been lead into thinking that Outlook created a double profile and that it made copies of all their mail while they were just checking to see what the new MS Outlook (ver. 97) looked like. This way some MS Exchange users could have unknowingly deleted all their e-mail that they perceived to be 'double', as MS Outlook did not have any front-end feature to notify users that it was actually using the same MS Exchange / Windows Messaging account.
- The original version lacks support of Internet mail (SMTP and POP3 support). They are only available with the other-purchased Microsoft Plus! pack.
- No support for International characters. Some e-mail that was sent with a non-ASCII or non-7/8-bit character set, was shown in the form of text attachments, which had to be saved and then read in a web browser, with the browser's text encoding set for a specified code page.
- HTML e-mail was shown in such a way that the message contained an *.ATT or *.htm attachment, which had to be saved and then viewed in a browser, as MS Exchange did not have support for HTML-formatted messages.
- In a similar fashion, e-mail that did not use traditional message formatting, was shown the same way: actual message content was delivered in the form of text attachments with the *.ATT extension, which could be opened through Notepad. These files were in turn saved in the active Temp directory and some sensitive e-mail could therefore have been made available for others users to see.
