Email could have been X.400 times better
24 points by gerikson
24 points by gerikson
This article discusses the interop problems that hindered X.400 from the end-user’s point of view. The server software was also troublesome: PP, which came from the ISODE project, supported JANET Grey Book email as well as Internet mail and X.400, so it was widely used in UK universities in the 1980s and 1990s. It has a reputation for being much heavier and less reliable than Internet MTAs.
I’m amused and appalled to learn there wasn’t a standard textual form for X.400 email addresses. Did they expect all addresses to come from searching the X.500 directory? But people still want to put their address on a business card or an ad.
The main thing that makes email worse than it could have been is Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. They were primarily based on X.400, which is visible when Exchange leaks its X.400 internals into Internet mail messages when it goes wrong. Microsoft reluctantly retrofitted it to support Internet mail, and they often got things wrong or left them out. (eg they repeatedly fucked up threading; they ignored format=flowed.) And they didn’t participate in the standards process so there was no way to improve things when the market leader was doing a bad job and ignoring everyone else.
Despite having 55 years to hone the technology, it is still arduous to set up and configure a mail server. Surely there must be simpler solutions by now?