Review of  "The Email Frontier" by blum & litwack.  <cite>

Most books on a technology simply cover the technical details.
Few try to cover an enitre "industry" roaming the full terrain of
technology and business.  This is one of those efforts, looking
at an industry which shows the peculiar characteristics of being
twenty years old, yet oddly nascent in much of its service and
product offerings.  Unless the book were entirely incompetent, I
would automatically recommend it by virtue of its scope and the
importance of the industry.  In fact, the book is quite
competent.

Truth in packaging:  I was a compensated pre-publication reviewer
for this book, with respect to its discussion of Internet email
and the Internet standards process.  I'd like to claim that this
makes the book's coverage of those topics stellar but it isn't
quite that good.  The authors have extensive background in
electronic mail consulting.  Such a business is dominated by work
with proprietary products and public messaging services, with
interconnection dominated by X.400 technology.  Until recently,
there was essentially no "Internet email" industry.  Therefore
like most workers in the commercial sector of email, the authors
had limited contact with the Internet.  The book reflects that
limitation, though not egregiously. In fact, the authors do an
excellent job of attempting to overcome what one might call bad
training. They do this by focussing on pragmatics.

The usual failing of email discussions is the mystical hand-wave
that promises the ultimate success of X.400, ignoring its
astonishingly slow growth and the real and massive traffic
dominance by Internet email.  After more than 10 years, one must
wonder at the style of thinking that allows one to ignore the
power of a huge installed base, such as the Internet.

E-Mail Frontier is broad, thorough and well-organized.  It
discusses business, marketing, product, service, technology, and
standards issues, attempting to provide a pragmatic view of the
entire industry.  It largely succeeds.  Don't rely on it as a
definitive source for particular details.  Instead, use it as a
comprehensive introduction and a broad analysis of the messaging
industry.  If you are a communications manager, are involved in
product marketing, or are otherwise concerned with global,
distributed applications services, you should read Email
Frontier.