Re: MS Mail ?
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.
