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Comment by ubermonkey | Hacker News Reader

SMTP predates Notes by nearly a decade.

More like 3 years, and in a very niche network that was not generally deployed in companies looking for email outside of certain niches.

SMTP is not a user interface. It’s just text from RFC821/822

Absolutely, but it came several years before MIME for example for formatted emails with attachments, and other things.

This. Any engineer or manager developing Notes at the time had to be aware of X.400 and X.500, and SMTP. They decided to ignore them. However cool and useful and clumsy Notes was, it was a proprietary walled garden. Lotus and the IBM hawked it, and surely profited. But for the customer it was an expense. Eventually Notes was overtaken by Metcalf’s Law, and the fact that cheaper always wins.

That and, you know, Microsoft.

Sure, but Notes was built for a world where ccMail, MS Mail, and GroupWise were the main workgroup email systems.

Notes followed a similar pattern, with a proprietary "post office" system with optional gateways to larger x.400 / SMTP / UUCP / OfficeVision networks for those who needed them.

Going SMTP (or even x.400)-native from the start might have been a better choice in the long run, but that's only clear in retrospect - it certainly wasn't obvious at the time.

Exchange is funny because it's X.400 native internally, even if recently they dropped external X.400 support

Yeah, Exchange is a good comparator because it shows what the mail aspect of Notes might have been like had it been designed in the mid 90s rather than the late 80s.

It's hard now to appreciate how different corporate IT was from the free-wheeling Internet world. The unexpected popularity of the web really did change everything.

One thing many people don't understand is that IP was not that common of a protocol in intranets for a long time, too

Plus just how much SMTP sucked compared to other systems and only got enough kludges barnacled onto it in semi-transparent way by late 1990s

in 1990 the internet was something talked about on your BBS as a mystical place you couldn't get access to except as a student. Lots of places had email, but it was unusual for anyone to be connected to any other system. Sometimes a BBS was part of fidonet, but that was rare (and there were many many less known networks).

Even if your typical big company did have a gateway for their internal email to other companies, odds are very few people used that gateway for business. If you wanted to communicate with somebody in a different company you dialed the phone or sent a fax.

On the other hand, anyone working on Notes would also be aware that its relationship with email is closer to today's Sharepoint than to today's Exchange. Email was one small aspect of a massive featureset; Notes was ahead of its time in terms of CRM/ERP/one-platform-for-everything that drives modern businesses like Oracle and Salesforce.

Lotus/IBM didn't ignore those standards.

The Notes directory was based on X.500 - it had the same attributes etc. Notes didn't implement DAP, but then almost nobody did, which is why we got LDAP.

There was an add-on connector for X.400 mail. I remember installing it a couple of times. It was fine, if cumbersome due to the nature of X.400. ;-)

They also didn't ignore SMTP. There was a connector for it for Notes 4.0 and 4.1, and starting with Notes 4.5 that connector was bundled in the box. Starting with Release 5 they retired the connector and moved SMTP functionality to be native in the mail router process, and for security they provided a separate SMTP listener task. Both of these were configured in the Notes Directory via Server Documents and Configuration Documents, just like any other feature of the server. If a Domino server wasn't sending or receiving SMTP, it's because its administrator didn't want it to, not because it couldn't.

It wasn't a walled garden, or if it was the wall was very low. By comparison Microsoft's first attempt to dethrone Notes - Exchange Public Folders - was a completely walled garden. And a very well fertilised one which people avoided due to the smell.

But it's OK, Microsoft then gave us SharePoint. The fact that Microsoft's customers rushed to it tells you how bad Public Folders were. So your comment "That and, you know, Microsoft" is much closer to the truth than protocol support.

(Source: I was a Principle Certified Lotus Domino Administrator for multiple versions, and have used & administered Lotus Notes versions from version 3.33 through to 8.5. I worked at a consultancy and installed many, many implementations of Lotus Notes across a number of topologies. I also had an Exchange Server MCP and worked with multiple versions of that too.)

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