2005 - Current

I got caught up in a Reduction-In-Force (RIF) and my last day as an employee of Sun was 10/31/05.  Since then I have been doing the same thing only in business for myself. I have been helping clients of various sizes with Sun’s Communications stack software, from architecture/design, installation, troubleshooting, etc..  I have been involved with email since 1995, so I have seen just about everything.  

2000-2005

I joined Sun Microsystems in 2000. I have spent the last four years with Sun in the Professional Services organization. I have spent most of this time working with some of the largest ISPs in the US, Federal government organizations, military, and enterprises of all sizes. I have helped customers migrate from other platforms, design, architect, and install new installations, and help with performance problems. It is hard to remember all of what I have done for customers. 

I started with PMDF back in 1995 while deploying it at Xerox as the central mail hub for their global enterprise. At the time it was a gateway between the Internet and some internal mail systems like Novell’s Global MHS and Microsoft’s Exchange systems. Over the course of 4 years I deployed PMDF at 5 different network hub locations, all over the globe. Two of those locations had two node OpenVMS clusters! I love the clustering capabilities of OpenVMS, no other OS confirms two or three times when you attempt to install it without clustering. 

Over the course of those years at Xerox I learned a lot about PMDF and email in general. I had some great teachers from Xerox PARC, Innosoft, and Opus1. Those people have my greatest respect and admiration. 

While also working on the Xerox account I spent time working with the firewall group, where I worked on things like DNS, VPNs, firewalls, DMZs, extra-nets, etc.. I’m also unix geek. I am writing this on my PowerBook which is running Mac OS X, which is the best desktop operating system, IMHO. 

For the curious I use iMS at home, running on an Ultra 10 with an UltraSPARC-IIi 440MHz processor and 128MB of RAM. Yes, 128! I didn’t say it was fast, but it easily handles the 1000+ messages it processes every day. 

For those that do not know iMS (or replace with the name of the day) started as a combination of PMDF, Sun Internet Mail Server (SIMS), and Netscape Messaging Server (NMS). The best components of each product were selected and became part of iMS/Sun ONE Messaging Server/Sun Java System Messaging Server. 

In 1997 Sun licensed the MTA technology of PMDF, which became the MTA of SIMS. In 2000, Sun acquired Innosoft International the vendor who created PMDF. Innosoft/Sun sold the PMDF product to Process Software, where it continues to evolve. 

The best component of PMDF was the MTA and this was selected as the MTA for iMS. From SIMS came the virtual/hosted domain capabilities and from NMS came the message store components (webmail, popd, imapd, and stored).