Talk:Messaging Application Programming Interface

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There's a huge misconception with this article. MAPI never included a protocol element. MAPI simply was a framework that allowed messaging clients to be written with no specific knowledge of the underlying specific messaging system.

This article needs to be rewritten. I and the development lead during MAPI's development will probably do so.

The protocol referred to as "MAPI Protocol" was actually called Exchange RPC. The MAPI design/development team did not design or implement this. It's proprietary to the Exchange server. It was, however, designed to be efficient with the MAPI API and as such has mechanisms which mimic quite closely the MAPI semantics.

Briandeen 20:16, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

MAPI defined two sets of API's, one set for clients and one set for service providers. It implemented a middleware layer that provided support for both API's and allowed the client to work against any messaging service for which providers were implemented, ideally with no specific knowledge of the service. The base client API was Extended MAPI, and the other client API's, largely intended for simple automation or tacking on simple email sending and receiving to an application, were themselves implemented using the Extended MAPI interface.

As Brian indicated, the protocol referred to in the article is part of the implementation of the Microsoft Exchange service providers. There are providers available for many other email servers. These include Notes, Domino, Groupwise, SAP R/3, Oracle InterOffice, and countless other email, storage and directory implementations. While Exchange is implemented specifically to MAPI and therefore doesn't suffer in translation, it is still only one of a myriad of available options for use with a MAPI client such as Outlook.

Brian and I will probably produce something for this article with substantially more detail. We'll also try to scare someone up to create a new article for the protocol information currently contained in this article, since it doesn't belong here.

VPerriello 02:06, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Any help in improving the article would be most welcome! Oh and Vince, I was a big BinkleyTerm fan "back in the day". :-) Warrens 02:23, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

The link refered to in these article is wrong as well. It should be using http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/mapi/html/edec509f-1153-498d-80db-05253fa01ca8.asp

Briandeen 02:54, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, Warren. We'll go to work on it. VPerriello 04:51, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

I don't think it is wrong to clarify that further, but while Micorsoft never called it "MAPI protocol" (although a link on microsoft's site does just that when you search for "MAPI Protocol" on google), it is common vernacular to refer to it this way. Just like Java's RMI isn't a protocol but people called JRMP (the original protocol) "RMI protocol". It is fine to separate it but maintaining that "although not technically correct people refer to the MS-RPC based 'Exchange Protocol' as 'MAPI protocol'" and link to the real protocol article. Reboot 03:03, 1 January 2007 (UTC)