ISO/IEC JTC1/SC33/WG1 is a Working Group of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC33, a subcommittee of ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1), which is a collaborative effort of both the International Organization for Standards (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).  Before the re-organisation of JTC1, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC33/WG1 was Working Group 4 of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18.

The main activity of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC33/WG1 is the production of standards for Message Handling Systems (MHS), often colloquially called electronic mail. These standards are produced collaboratively with Question 14 of Study Group 7 of the International Telecommunication Union, Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T). Participation in the MHS Collaborative Team is open to anyone representing an ISO/IEC member body (typically a national standards organisation, such as AFNOR, ANSI, BSI, DIN) or liaison organisation, or representing an ITU Member State or an ITU Sector Member.

The completed standards produced by the MHS Collaborative Team are published by ISO/IEC as ISO/IEC 10021 and as the ITU-T X.400 series of Recommendations.

Some SC33/WG1 documents are available here.

Additions to the MHS standards are being developed; many are currently under ballot within ISO/IEC. The programme of work gives full details.

Draft documents on additions to the MHS standards are in drafts in preparation. Some temporary documents produced at the recent Geneva meeting of the MHS Collaborative Team are also available.

There is a defect correction process for the MHS standards, in which alleged defects are reported, if agreed to be actual defects the proposed corrections are subject to ballot, then if agreed issued for publication as Technical Corrigenda. Technical Corrigenda to the 1990 publication have been incorporated into the 1996/7 publication.

To complement the standards produced by the MHS Collaborative Team, a set of Functional Standards called International Standardized Profiles (ISPs) for MHS (MHS ISPs) have been produced in a collaboration between the European Workshop on Open Systems (EWOS), Asia & Oceania Regional Workshop on Open System (AOW) and the Open Systems Environment Implementors Workshop (OIW).

You may need to download the free Adobe Acrobat Reader 3.0 to view many of the WG1 documents.

Terms of Reference for ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG4:

To develop standards for services, procedures and protocols that enable communication between applications on distributed systems.