IP Messaging Encompasses a Range of Popular Services

Messages have been a part of real-time communications for a very long time. In fact, it is said that in the early years of telephone service, operators talked to each other and then passed written messages to the relevant users as an audible replacement for the telegraph.

eMail, an integral component of most time-share computing services in the 1960s and 1970s, only connected the users of the computer that hosted the service. Not until 1971 when Ray Tomlinson wrote SNDMSG and READMAIL as a network service did eMail assume the appearance of today's requisite messaging tool.

Voice Mail, invented by Gordon Matthews in 1979, delivers the powerful advantage of allowing users to create their own greetings and manage their own messages flows.

Instant Messaging has become as pervasive as voice mail, but with public services presents some annoying and at times dangerous consequences, such as unwanted pop-up windows, a multitude of advertising, and in some cases the delivery of viruses.

Find Me/ Follow Me capabilities put the caller on hold while the system attempts through a pre-configured set of numbers to notify the called party. If called parties respond to the system, they are told of the pending call and then can decide to accept it or not.

Fax Mail integrates fax functions into e-mail services and separates transmission from printing. Users send a fax to a central server which captures the transmission and records it in a computer-readable format such as a tiff. In some implementations, an initial recipient can review the fax cover page online and then forward the fax via e-mail to the correct destination. Other systems assign each user a unique fax number which allows incoming faxes to be automatically forwarded to the correct recipient.

Read Me E-mail, also known as text-to-speech, integrates speech synthesizers into e-mail processing so recipients can listen to their messages.

Unified Messaging brings voice mail, e-mail, and fax mail services together. It can be unified at the end user client (Outlook or Notes for example), at the server, or at both locations.

IP Messaging refers to the integration of all of these messaging services.