Meet the 'internet radical' who helped Microsoft get email and AT&T get online
Tom Evslin was an early‑1990s “internet radical” at Microsoft who helped create the Exchange Server and Outlook email clients. He pushed for internet‑based email gateways despite Bill Gates’ focus on competing with Lotus Notes, and later advised AT&T on its internet strategy and ISP launch. His work influenced both Microsoft’s email products and AT&T’s move onto the web.
- ▪Evslin described himself as an “internet radical” who advocated for integrating internet protocols into Microsoft’s Exchange and Outlook products.
- ▪Bill Gates prioritized Exchange as a response to Lotus Notes, delaying deeper internet integration until after product launches.
- ▪Evslin built an SMTP gateway that saw rapid adoption as email traffic shifted to the internet, contradicting corporate safety concerns.
- ▪AT&T recruited Evslin to develop its internet strategy, encouraging the company to become an ISP and adopt all‑you‑can‑eat pricing.
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| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/08/02/meet-the-internet-radical-who-helped-microsoft-get-email-and-att-get-online/5281281 |
| Publication time | Sun, 02 Aug 2026 09:11:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-02T07:15:40.490Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-02T07:15:40.490Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | KqDzXdSTS79w · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); OFFBEAT Meet the 'internet radical' who helped Microsoft get email and AT&T get online Tom Evslin on Bill Gates, the birth of Exchange, and dragging Ma Bell onto the web Richard Speed Richard Speed MICROSOFT ECOSYSTEM REPORTER Published sun 2 Aug 2026 // 08:11 UTC Tom Evslin drove the WorldNet project at AT&T and helped develop what became Microsoft Exchange and Outlook.
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