Angus Kidman on the challengers lining up for a slice of the email action.

Published in The Bulletin, February 11 2003

Software companies rarely try to develop new products in mature markets, especially if that market is dominated by Microsoft. It's a rule, however, that doesn't apply to email software, one of the biggest markets (an estimated 40 billion email ­messages are sent every day).

Microsoft's Outlook client family has the biggest audience share in the PC space, in large part because it comes bundled with market juggernauts Windows and Office. That high visibility has ensured strong sales for the software giant's Exchange email server. Yet millions more users access email via a web browser, creating a highly competitive market. Future products promise to change how we think about email even further.

Historically, Microsoft's strongest competitors in the email space have been IBM's Lotus Domino and Novell's GroupWise. Second-ranked Domino actually earns more revenue than Exchange, due to higher licensing fees and a wider range of tools. In the past year, a number of new offerings have entered the fray, including Oracle's Collaboration Suite, SCO's SCOoffice Mail Server and HP Sendmail.

In a neat twist, many of these rival products exploit Microsoft's ubiquity on the desktop by allowing users to continue to utilise the familiar Outlook client while connecting to a different server. Several also run under Linux, which is gaining increasing popularity in corporations, and posing a threat to Microsoft in the process.

While Outlook remains a popular default choice, and will be upgraded when Office 11 is released, new rival clients continue to appear. Later this year, IBM will launch an enterprise email system targeted at staff who don't have access to email, even if their company has an email infrastructure. So why have those workers missed out? "Traditional email products have been too expensive or required a full-blown system," says Mickey Hollison, director for advanced collaboration at Lotus.

Elsewhere, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor is working on a new email project, codenamed Chandler, which shifts even further from the Outlook approach. The client will combine the open-source approach of Linux with the peer-to-peer capabilities made popular by music-sharing systems such as Napster, allowing users to share address book data and other information.

However, Kapor has bristled at recent suggestions that the Chandler project, which isn't expected until next year, could be characterised as an "Outlook killer".

What is certain is that there's still a killing to be made with the right features. By 2006, IDC predicts the global market for messaging software will be worth more than $7bn a year.