Commercial Email. In 1988, Vinton Cerf arranged for the connection of MCI Mail to the NSFNET through the Corporation for the National Research Initiative (CNRI) for “experimental use”, providing the first sanctioned commercial use of the Internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCI_Mail Shortly thereafter, in 1989, the Compuserve mail system also connected to the NSFNET, through the Ohio State University network. Online Services. In 1993, the large network service providers America Online and Delphi started to connect their proprietary email systems to the Internet, beginning the large scale adoption of Internet email as a global standard. Microsoft History The Windows and OS/2 clients were built around an early version of MAPI called MAPI 0, and could in theory enable the client to talk to any server by replacing the MAPI DLL with a fully compliant DLL for the appropriate system. Unlike the Microsoft Mail 3.x server product in 1992, the clients could support Bcc: functionality. This functionality was not exposed to Microsoft Mail for PC Networks users due to limitations in the server architecture, but the corporate internal MAPI.DLL enabling these particular clients to talk to Xenix-based mail transport systems utilised this functionality. The first and almost immediately recalled version of the Microsoft Press book on using Microsoft Mail accidentally used screenshots from the Xenix backend, revealing this concealed capability of the client. Gateways. Connections to other email systems were made possible by gateways to "foreign mail systems". Microsoft shipped gateways to PROFS, SNADS (Office Vision), SMTP, X.400 over X.25, Novell's Message Handling System (MHS), MCI Mail, AT&T Mail, and others. Many companies running these gateways quickly replaced them with Microsoft Exchange Server connectors once Microsoft Exchange 4.0 shipped. In particular an early part of a migration from MSMail to Exchange included replacing the Microsoft Mail for PC Networks Gateway to SMTP to the Microsoft Exchange Internet Mail Connector, later renamed to the Microsoft Exchange Internet Mail Service. The original Windows 95 "Inbox" client also used MAPI and was called "Microsoft Exchange". A stripped-down version of the Exchange Client that does not have support for Exchange Server was released as Windows Messaging to avoid confusion; it was included with Windows 95 OSR2, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4. It was discontinued because of the move to email standards such as SMTP, IMAP, and POP3, all of which Outlook Express supports better than Windows Messaging. Microsoft Internet Mail and News Version 1.0 was released as Microsoft Internet Mail and News in 1996 following the Internet Explorer 3 release. This add-on precedes the Internet Mail profile for Microsoft Exchange 4.0 bundled in Windows 95. Version 2.0 was released at the end of 1996. Internet Mail and News handled only plain text and rich text (RTF) email, lacking HTML email. Microsoft Exchange Server up to version 5.0 (May 97) came bundled with Microsoft Exchange Client as the email client. After version 5.0, this was replaced by Microsoft Outlook, bundled as part of Microsoft Office 97 (January 97) and later. When Outlook 97 was released, Exchange Client 5.0 was still in development and to be later released as part of Exchange Server 5.0, primarily because Outlook was only available for Windows. Later, in Exchange Server 5.5 (Nov 97), Exchange Client was removed and Outlook was made the only Exchange client. As part of Exchange Server 5.5, Outlook was released for other platforms. In October 1997 the app was changed and renamed as Outlook Express and bundled with Internet Explorer 4. The Windows executable file for Outlook Express, msimn.exe, is a holdover from the Internet Mail and News era. Like Internet Explorer, Outlook Express 4 can run on Mac System 7, OS 8, and OS 9. Similarly, Netscape released Netscape Communicator in 1997 with an email client. Launch of Hotmail Hotmail service was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, and was one of the first webmail services on the Internet along with Four11's RocketMail (later Yahoo! Mail). It was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, symbolizing "freedom" from ISP-based email and the ability to access a user's inbox from anywhere in the world. The limit for free storage was 2 MB. Hotmail was initially backed by venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. By December 1997, it reported more than 8.5 million subscribers. Hotmail initially ran under Solaris for mail services and Apache on FreeBSD for web services, before being partly converted to Microsoft products, using Windows Services for UNIX in the migration path. Hotmail was sold to Microsoft in December 1997 for a reported $400 million, and it joined the MSN group of services. Hotmail quickly gained in popularity as it was localized for different markets around the globe, and became the world's largest webmail service with more than 30 million active members reported by February 1999. Hotmail originally ran on a mixture of FreeBSD and Solaris operating systems Yahoo Mail launched in 1997 as a webmail client Apple Mail launched in 2001 as part of Mac OS X Mozilla Thunderbird 2004 Gmail 2004 An alternative to SMTP was x.400 developed in the 1980s in Geneva by the ITU. Employed by Microsoft initially. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.400 In Australia in 1990, we saw the interim otc.au and telememo.au (to support an email gateway to the X.400 mail service provided by what was then OTC).