In May 1996 twenty world leading fax and messaging vendors met to discuss the needs for a fundamentally new messaging service designed to follow postal mail, telex, fax and e-mail as the fifth messaging service.

Why should a new messaging service be required? Fax was designed for manual input and output of paper; computer fax computerized this process; and e-mail was initially developed for short informal messaging. New forms of documents were evolving using multiple media and computer networks, coupled a wider choice of carriers, and new uses of documents.

While document transmission costs have fallen, "whole document cycle costs" have increased. Research studies show 99% of cycle costs involve creation, live use, retention and archiving, with transmission accounting for a mere 1%. New solutions were needed to address this 99%.

The result of a May ’96 meeting was the formation of the G5 Messaging Forum, an open, non-profit organization. Its mission was to create the definition for a new service, brand and promote the service, and liaise with Standards Bodies.

The Forum members’ backgrounds included computer fax, Internet, service providers, e-commerce, major computer suppliers, voice and fax machine vendors, accounting for the supply of some 30% of intercompany messaging stations. Included in membership were Rockwell, Equisys, Matsushita, Xerox, Symantec, Cheyenne, Brooktrout, National Westminster Bank, and a small UK company called 5th Generation Messaging, which provided the initial ideas and the Forum’s Chairman. Other companies including Lotus and Microsoft assisted in the work.

These features ensured that anyone with a document on a PC would be able to send text/image across any three carriers.

These features accommodated a spectrum of messaging requirements from informal e-mail to registered postal mail, and achieved a $2.50 cost savings for archiving and retention per document.

These features reduce unnecessary manual functions and improve performance.

Much has been written in the press concerning the security of Internet transmissions, use of digital signatures, certification authorities etc., but little attention has been paid to the related issues of legality and interoperability without which all such endeavors would flounder.

For hundreds of years paper has been an acceptable way for businesses and other organizations to store their documents. Most companies now use computers and in many cases the original of a document is in electronic form. It has been estimated that 70% of company documents are generated on PCs. The legal position on company records in electronic form is not clear-cut. In legal disputes electronic evidence is sometimes accepted and sometimes not and in some countries electronic originals are legally admissible while in others they are not.

Following two years of work coordinated by 5th Generation Messaging Ltd., and involving some 130 organizations, the British Standards Institution (BSI) issued a Technical Code of Best Practice in February 1996 for the storage of documents in electronic form on electronic media. The code set a standard of system and process controls, which give confidence that electronic records have been stored and retained according to best practice.

G5 Messaging has a full feature set of facilities to support both legality and security but also to ensure effective interoperability. Too many current solutions to these problems are proprietary and only allow development within "closed user" communities.

The front of a G5 Message contains a G5 Message Header which holds details of sender, recipient, subject and any keywords. At point of transmission, an electronic postmark is added to this header file. This contains a unique message ID to identify the message, a time and date stamp applied at point of transmission (for legal purposes), and a checksum of the entire message—the result is then encrypted. This provides security for the content of the message.

The recipient’s system verifies the encrypted checksum to ensure the integrity of the message, records the message to secure storage and generates its own electronic postmark which is returned to the sender as a message confirmation. This is also stored securely.

Both parties therefore have two postmarks identifying the message, its time and date checksums and its confirmation receipt with the same. Technically this provides for mutual non-repudiation.

Provided the message is stored securely in compliance with the Codes, this standard feature of G5 Messaging will provide a basis for legal admissibility and electronic original retention.

Other facilities use a feature in G5 Messaging called the security attachment. This is a method of attaching an additional special purpose encrypted MIME datafile to a message. Typically Smartcards would be used to apply these features. The 3 facilities include authenticated sender (‘I am the sender of the message’); digital signature (‘I am personally signing this message’); confirmation of a personal receipt confirmation request (‘I have personally received this message’).

Message encryption is often confused with legality and security. Message encryption as a technique is chiefly concerned with ensuring an unwanted reader is unable to read the contents of a message. As such it has little to do with proving a transmission took place at a point in time, nor that the message was retained in a secure archive, which are the key elements required for legality/electronic purposes.

G5 Messaging’s encryption facilities are unique in that they allow negotiation of the content encryption algorithm with the recipient and a common fallback to ensure a successful encrypted transmission can take place. Digital signatures can also be transmitted within this framework.

For ultra high level message encryption a single session encryption call can be set up by means of a service call to a third party. The message encryption and decryption is then only known by that party and provided for that call only.

G5 Messaging provides a unique series of facilities to provide legally admissible transfer and electronic original retention, enhancements for personal transmission and receipt, negotiated message encryption.

It thus uniquely answers all 3 needs—legality, security and interoperability, and these developments can be measured by considering two key areas of IT activity:

1. Internet commerce—trading will not be legally sustainable without the effective "Electronic Original" retention of transactions.
2. Document retention where current paper based records systems are growing at 20% per year and savings of $2.50 per document are achievable from the electronic original retention.

Proposals are being developed with the IMTC and VOIP Forum for submission to IETF and ITU respectively if necessary.

This is an international initiative designed to provide legal admissibility of electronic communications by way of 5 New Codes of Best Practice. G5 Messaging conforms to the technical requirements of these Codes. We are supplying information to MMTA, the EMA, and IMC.

The G5 Messaging Forum is and will be contributing to IETF standards work in the areas of session-based SMTP, Internet fax, and content negotiation.

The G5 Messaging Forum membership includes companies fully involved in ITU/IETF work. In addition the Forum is and will continue to use the services of Dave Crocker, James Rafferty and Herman Silbiger to assist in its work.

Future development work of the Forum includes profiles for fax machine development, additional service call definitions, and new applications integration (e.g., document management and e-commerce/electronic invoicing).

There are important distinctions between unified or integrated messaging and G5 Messaging. The first seeks to tie existing developments and their shortcomings together, for example, e-mail, fax, and voice. The second seeks to meet new user requirements in messaging.

G5 Messaging attacks user transmission costs and widens service choice. Faxes can be sent directly by Internet, and e-mails can be sent faster by carriers. It attacks document life cycles and reduces handling costs. It is designed for multimedia messaging, ensuring that the recipient can handle the incoming message whatever file types it carries. (e.g., text can be added to or answered with voice messaging).

Its quality and security features match corporate requirements for more rigorous messaging and encryption solutions. It interoperates with both existing e-mail and fax and will shortly drop down from unsuccessful real time voice and VOIP calls, recognizing the need to meet "set time working". Indexing, addressing and negotiation information all assist the user. Service calls add new levels of support to messaging.