Jump to content

Message Handling System

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Pascal.Tesson (talk | contribs) at 15:50, 22 December 2006 (categorize). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Novell's MHS (Message Handling Service) was an important early email protocol.

Originally developed by Action Technologies, Inc. (ATI) in 1986, it was first licenced, then later bought outright by Novell.

Role as a gateway

MHS was a very 'open' system, and this, with Novell's encouragement, made it popular in the early 1990's as a 'glue' between not only the proprietary email systems of the day such as PROFS, SNADS, MCI, 3+Mail and ccMail, but also the competing standards-based SMTP and X.400 - however by 1996 it was clear that SMTP across the Internet would take over this role.

A compatible range of gateway products called Connect2 from Infinite Technologies (now Captaris)[1] was also very widely used as part of MHS-based email networks.

Email clients

Pioneering Wndows-based da Vinci email and the free Pegasus Mail client both used MHS as their native protocol.