PS. The cover image is a striking photomosaic of currencies forming a
dollar bill image. See www.photomosaic.com for details; it's the Truman
Show poster firm. Media Lab spinout.]
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/journal/sj/371/vonkanel.html
Internet Messaging Frameworks
by J. von Kanel <vonkaaut.html>, J. S. Givler <vonkaaut.html>, B. Leiba
<vonkaaut.html>, and W. Segmuller <vonkaaut.html>
Reprint Order No. G321-5660.
Electronic mail (e-mail) has become an important tool for companies to use
to conduct their businesses. With the introduction of the World Wide Web,
awareness of the existence of the Internet has exponentially increased over
the last two years, and people are starting to realize that there is more
to the Internet than just the Web. Companies are expanding their use of
e-mail from internal to external. But the large set of proprietary,
noninteroperable e-mail systems make this more of a trip through a jungle
than a drive along the information highway. Most approaches to overcome the
connectivity problems use gateways to convert between the proprietary
format and the Internet standards. These conversions are lossy at best;
hence, most proprietary system vendors are revamping their systems to base
them on Internet standards. This paper summarizes the current state of the
most important Internet standards related to e-mail and the general state
of proprietary e-mail systems. It then introduces a set of technologies we
developed to solve the complex problem of evolving from proprietary to
Internet-standards-based e-mail systems. We have structured these
technologies into Internet Messaging Frameworks.