This article provides a summary of the various forms of electronic mail presently available. While the publication date of the article is shown as 1984, much of the material therein relates to the 1979/80 period. In an area where technology is moving so fast, and where public acceptance of emerging services has been little short of incredible, the resultant picture tends to be somewhat misleading.

A brief introduction is provided in which mention is made of the historical development of Telex and TWX services; this is important in view of their widespread usage world-wide today. A more detailed coverage of facsimile concepts is then provided. The characteristics of the various types of facsimile machines (according to CCITT grouping) are explained, and some possib- le directions for development are explored. Mention is made of facsimile compression techniques, and of facsimile-to-text (and vice versa) conversion procedures. The author then offers a brief resume of private teletypewriter networks and intra-company message networks. The emerging international CCITT-developed Teletex standard receives a scant three or four lines of coverage.

A more detailed description is provided for Computer-Based Message Services (CBMSs), although the author persists in referring to these as Electronic Message Systems. It is unfortunate that he does not include a few illustrations depicting some typical usage of such services (e.g., composition of outgoing messages, scanning and reading of incoming messages, etc.). Some of the more advanced facilities of such services appear to have been overlooked in entirety; amongst these are message filing and retrieval capabilities, access to database and computational facilities, and Telex/Teletex interworking.

The author’s list of CBMS vendors and service providers contains a couple of notable omissions. Also conspicuous by its absence is a consideration of the sorts of issues which are presently of concern to the Message Handling Service groups within the CCITT; specifically, interworking between CBMSs and the associated directory, distribution list, and naming conventions. The article concludes with a brief consideration of voice mail developments, and some discussion of the interworking issues.