2. Mission critical e-business
Internet email is a key component in electronic commerce. This often means that not only will the volume of Internet email go up but the importance of Internet email increases. When a business stands to loose revenue because of interruptions of Internet email, it's time to rethink the SMTP infrastructure.

3. Rapid adoption of standards
The messaging industry and business at large has selected Internet standards for messaging making the SMTP, MIME, POP3, IMAP4, LDAP, S/MIME, X.509 and SSL standards increasingly important. This means that companies are implementing systems supporting these technologies at a record pace.

4. Business-to-business Internet
Traditional, proprietary business-to-business email communications (MCI Mail, Compuserve Mail, SprintMail, AT&T Mail) are being dropped at a rapid pace in favor of Internet-based communications. It is worth noting that the overall volume of business-to-business email tends to increase and this trend is likely to continue. In part, this is because proprietary email systems are now connected to the Internet at large. In the late 80s, you chose your proprietary provider and mostly communicated with others on that service. Now, everyone can reach everyone else and the service itself has become far less visible in the overall email infrastructure.

5. Thirst for bandwidth
Often the network infrastructure for SMTP, in terms of server backbones, internal WANs, and connections to the Internet turn out to be unable to handle the load. Companies do not always realize the interdependency of these three aspects of networking and their impact on Internet email reliability.

6. Competition for Internet access
One common problem is that SMTP email services are often in competition with the Web for access from internal networks to the Internet. This means that corporate email to and from the Internet can be interrupted by an excess of casual browser users, outside visitors, or even PointCast subscribers. To avoid this, network planners must anticipate this issue. [Here at ZATZ, we had noticed a different problem. Whenever there's a cute animation or video going around via email forwarding, our pipe often gets clogged when someone decides to send a 24MB video to 200 of her closest friends. We've been able to discourage this practice through training and we see far fewer "hairballs" in the pipe. -- DG]

7. Unsolicited bulk email
Most companies are virtually helpless against unsolicited commercial email (colloquially referred to as "SPAM"). Often corporate backbones are flooded by unauthorized SMTP relaying and users are sometimes inundated with SPAM email messages. Spammers use a variety of techniques to probe networks and to discover user email addresses. Companies that fail to aggressively combat spammers could become victims at any point.

8. Larger and larger messes
When looking at email statistics, network planners often ignore the inevitable increase in message sizes. Also, statistics for internal email are often used to make projections of network traffic for Internet email when, in fact, Internet email messages often have many more and sometimes larger attachments than internal email messages.