Meet the 'internet radical' who helped Microsoft get email and AT&T get online Tom Evslin drove the WorldNet project at AT&T and helped develop what became Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. He was at Microsoft when the company was still working out what to do about this newfangled internet thing. Evslin describes himself as one of Microsoft's "internet radicals" in the early 1990s, when the company was …
Yeah, the 'about' page of that blog has his bio, including Exchange, WorldNet, natural gas trucking ... : https://blog.tomevslin.com/about-tom-evslin.html
His github (linked from that bio) displays the same portrait as found on the YT channel you listed: https://github.com/tevslin
He was also instrumental in spreading the Internet Exploder curse all over the place: https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/07/30/30-years-ago-att-gave-internet-explorer-the-default-advantage/5279373
... and that's probably why he was exiled to Vermont, imho! ;) [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Evslin ]
I seem to recall a MS Mail server (service?) in the early 1990s that sat on a PC in a machine root with a Unix (super)minicomputer and Unix boxes. I think it talked smtp with a Unix box that acted as the email gateway. I think the already arcane sendmail.cf was even more so dealing with the vagaries of what MS made of rfc821. The gateway forwarded and received email over an Aussie dialup store·and·forward network protocol†.
The good old days — may the memories remain only memories.
† ACSnet. The guilty might have known it as suniii.
If we’re talking about abominations, MS Mail, also known as Network Courier, definitely belongs on the list.
I worked for a large financial services company in the early ’90s that deployed MS Mail across multiple sites and countries. The predictable result was a fragile, temperamental system that had everyone walking on eggshells, waiting for the next breakage. Like all shared filesystem email systems of that era, it didn’t scale, and it depended on a small army of techs constantly propping it up.
Once you added the SMTP, X.400, SNADS gateways and the other fragile bolt-ons, the whole thing became a nightmare to manage.
Then along came the “holy grail”: Microsoft Exchange. I’m admittedly biased, as I’d been involved since the early betas, but Exchange was a revelation. It provided a solid X.400 backbone for inter-site connectivity, a decent SMTP connector that actually complied with RFC 821, and connectors into MS Mail so we could quickly migrate off that sinking ship. Versions 4.0, 5.0, and 5.5 were solid performers. With Exchange 2000, transport switched to native SMTP and unfortunately started to drift from the RFCs, but I still run it today. That said, Microsoft’s more recent policies have me finally looking for alternatives after 30+ years.
On the client side, I always had a soft spot for the original Exchange client "Capone", though it was ultimately displaced by the upstart Outlook.
They were “the good old days” in their own twisted way: sleep deprivation, plenty of angst, and three-day delays for email to reach London over terrible corporate links. Once Exchange and IP (that is, the wider internet) came into play, it was a massive improvement.
That Exchange was designed to share documents over a secure local intranet between employees of a single company explains why the addition of SMTP still leads to headlines.
Russian spies take their half-click email attack from Zimbra to Outlook
https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/07/30/russian-spies-take-their-half-click-email-attack-from-zimbra-to-outlook/5281033
> be able to support graphics, to be able to support fonts, so that you could format an email in the same way that you could format a Word document
You mean we should be thankful that we didn't get an even WORSE "email for marketing twonks" than what we have to put up now?
"Say it loud, say it proud, only plain text is allowed!"
Say it loud, you lost. The reason you lost is that, when someone wanted to show emphasis or tables in a message, you told them it was heresy and couldn't happen instead of finding a better way to do it, so the person who found the way you don't like made the standard and you got to fight against it. I'm not sure how good your reasons for disliking it are, but that doesn't end up mattering because, by now, your objections are irrelevant to what is being used.
There's a lesson for anyone trying to make things better. If users want something enough, they'll get it, and you can't stop that. Your preferred option of it not happening is not one you get to choose. You do get two options, though. Option 1: give the users what they want, which lets you pick the best, or least bad, way it can be accomplished. Option 2: watch someone else give the users what they want, quite possibly not in the best or least bad way, and your influence declines because you sat there while someone else made what will become the standard.
I stopped supporting Exchange, or better my org at the time, dropped it like a hot potatoe, and that was the end of my Exchange(brief as it was) administration. Brand new shiny AD running on 2003 servers, and exchange added, it was not the mail server the org needed, I was elated and confounded a the same time.
"...Brand new shiny AD ..." -ah, Active Directory.
As proven by https://www.samba.org/ Andrew Tridgell, Active Directory was LDAP (a public standard) buried in three layers of proprietary obfuscation.
Did Hotmail exist 20 years ago? I believe it did.
Hotmail was smpt, running on FreeBSD or Linux, which MS bought, and took years to get working after trying to get it to run on MS OS. Yep, that was back when Bill Gates dictated that MS should 'eat it's own dogfood'. How things change: Linux the 'cancer' now runs 60% of Azure workloads, Linux is now embedded in MS Windows, and at the June MS carnival, the screenshots showed that VLC was the video player of choice.
The Mister Engineer from AT&T ? - nope. Not really.
It was (I think still is) the original distributed database/email system.
Drop an .NSF file anywhere, local or server, set up a replication doc and it'll sync perfectly on a schedule.
Back in the day my mailfile sat in eight countries/continents.
UK, Amsterdam, North America, South America, Tokyo, Australia, NZ, Moscow.
Plus the server in my flat.
University I was associated wanted to drop MS so badly that they dropped Exchange for Notes.
That went so well that they rolled back after 4-5 months. Next year, they went to gmail, which at that point was evolving so rapidly that, while not as good as exchange, it was then good enough.
Did it not? What you seem to be describing is something I have a vague memory of being called "The Microsoft Network", which I was (un)fortunate enough to try on my W95 PC with my 14.4K modem...
See - I'm not the only one to remember it:
http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/the-microsoft-network/
> .. when the company was developing Exchange Server to fend off the threat from Lotus Notes.
You know, I fear for future historians who use such as reference. Lotus Notes was destroyed by Microsoft in pursuit of it's total hegemony on the desktop.
Dec 1988: ‘Assuming we would be willing to launch a hostile takeover of Lotus. At a per share price of $25 to a buy-out of Lotus, we would need access to approximately $1.2 billion in financing (dept or equity). Assuming Manzi wants to keep his job, we could probably negotiate a "green mail" price of say $30 per share.’
Jan 1989: “Basic Program Concept Microsoft will offer PC Excel purchasers either $75 or a copy of Windows 286/386 if they send us: Their Lotus 1-2-3 system disk”
May 1999: “Microsoft repeatedly told us that as long as we were shipping competitive products, such as Smart Suite and OS2, we would not be treated the same as Compaq and others”
Feb 1995: “Lack of appropriate support and documentation for OCX. Microsoft applications and tools seem to have an unfair advantage using OCX-how did Microsoft release container apps when nobody is supposed to have sample code yet?”
May 25 1995: “By now, you should have received via fax an invitation to our upcoming OLE DB Design Preview. The Design Preview will be here at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington on June 7&8.”
Noah Mendelsohn: “Thanks for the email followup. No .. I did not receive the fax. Do you know to which fax number you sent it? The updated fax number that I gave you a few weeks ago, 617-693-8676, is correct. I suspect that your distribution lists for design review announcements may have had an old number.”
Mar 2007: “Microsoft has publicly committed, on numerous occasions, to ensuring a fair separation between the application and the system groups at Microsoft .. Key developers of technologies relating to OLE 2.0 and OCX have transfered back and forth between Microsoft application and operating system groups over the past several years.”
I loved and loathed Exchange Server and the surrounding ecosystem in equal measures.
My absolute nemesis for years of my IT career were PST files. The scourge of users and admins.
"Your PC won't boot? Let's not waste time troubleshooting, we'll just slap a nice fresh Ghost image on there and have you back up and running in no time. What's that? You had three years of business critical emails stored in pst files because your mailbox had 100mb quota?"
"Outlook won't start because your pst file has hit the size limit. So, I've got to rename the old file, let Outlook start and create a new one, copy corrupted file to an admin machine and let the repair tool run for hours before copying it back (over fast ethernet)".
