Electronic messaging, whether in an office environment or for electronic commerce, is normally carried out in natural language, even when supported by information systems. For a variety of reasons, it would be useful if electronic messaging systems could have semantic access to, that is, access to the meanings and contents of, the messages they process. Given that natural language understanding is not a practicable alternative, there remain three approaches to delivering systems with semantic access: electronic data interchange (EDI), tagged messages, and the development of a formal language for business communication (FLBC). We favor the latter approach. In this article we compare and contrast these three approaches, present a theoretical basis for an FLBC (using speech act theory), and describe a prototype implementation.