Many years of email system incompatabilities created great frustration for the early users of the net. So a specific protocol was built to allow any email client to talk to any email server. Every other email server in the world uses this protocol. Except Microsoft’s Exchange.

Exchange when it was created they also created a whole new system of authentication and a whole new protocol to exchange email. It is not better or worse in most respects. Only different. Done so to prevent people from accessing Exchange without Outlook or other Microsoft tools. Just to make things even more interesting is that this special format Microsoft uses gets changed every so often. So even Microsoft clients eventually can no longer connect to that email server.

The emails themselves are normally not different in any way. Microsoft added some awefull mime types that never should have been added. A mime type is a description of a type of file so two computers can exchange these files and the receiving computer will know what to do with the incoming file by it’s mime type. The equivalent in smail mail would be a bulky package would have one mime type, a letter another mime type, junk mail yet another mime type. Thus when you get junk mail you can throw it away by it’s mime type without having to read it for example. Too bad the real post office doesn’t have such a handy feature?

For a time Microsoft also tried a propriatory email formating but it was clunky and died off soon enough. Today most Exchange messages are sent in the HTML format. So many 1k bits of information are wrapped in 10k of encoding.

To connect to an Exchange server is typically different. Again instead of using existing standards Exchange uses it’s own. Older Exchange servers use the NTLM method of authentication. Which is only one step better than the old school POP3 standard in that it adds a very simple and easy to ***** encryption to the comunications. There are several ways besides NTLM which is mostly obsolete today to connect to an Exchange server. Most companies which run Exchange are still running old versions of Exchange so NTLM is the normal method of connecting still.

When your client gets an email it is stored in a format that is specific to your client. So you might be refering more to how Outlook stores it’s email rather than Exchange. Most email clients today are standardizing on the Unix standard email format. This allows easy porting of email between different email clients. While Microsoft has zero support for that many email clients can easily import the Outlook format into thier format. Worst comes to worst you can export it in a csv format.