In other news sixteen years ago the US mortgage provider Freddie Mac has selected x.400 as their primary standard for electronic mail.
For those of you who do not know Freddie Mac, the first paragraph of this article explains more;
Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp., is one of America’s busiest purveyors of mortgages. Located in McLean, Va., Freddie Mac receives mortgages from 5,000 to 6,000 financial institutions daily and adds value by processing and packaging these funds into securities that are then sold through 200 brokerage houses to investors.
Managing such high volumes of data and still providing reliable and responsive service to investors is no small feat, and today Freddie Mac is about to implement an X.400-based delivery system.
Their project lead explained the projects objectives in a little more detail in the same article;
“We are progressive in our technology,” says Mullett, “but we also focus on proven technologies. X.400, in our opinion, satisfies both criteria.”
The primary reason for selecting X.400 is that it allows Freddie Mac to deliver messages almost anywhere in the world via private and public network services.
“We want to provide a level of customer service unmatched by any industry,” Mullett says. “No matter what system the customer is using, we aim to communicate.”
In selecting an X.400 vendor, Freddie Mac looked for not just OSI standards compliance, but also the availability of proven, easy-to-use APIs (application program interfaces), good administration facilities, and vendor reputation. Freddie Mac’s team not only evaluated the vendors’ products as X.400 messaging systems, but took the next step and developed prototype applications to test ease of integration with the implementations.
Looking back on this announcement, knowing what we do now about messaging handling systems, this all seems a little ridiculous. Of course, when Freddy Mac announced this decision it was pretty much the given route to managing email in large scale environments for hundreds of thousands of enterprises and governments around the world.
Many organizations mandated the use of x.400 messaging, along with an x.500 directory for the more adventurous.
What ever happened to all those x.400 implementations, and all those hundreds of millions of dollars that were spent deploying them? – all in the name of openness.
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