“Media-On-Demand” Multimedia Electronic Mail: An Approach to Support Online Services

Abstract

The existing design of e-mail systems architecture is effective for exchanging text-only message, but it is not capable of handling the multimedia message which has much larger volume, and requires more bandwidth and storage space than the text-only messages in order to store-and-forward the multimedia message. It is very slow and inefficient if the multimedia message is relaying on a slow network connection with limited bandwidth. Because of limited network bandwidth and disk spaces, some network mail handling system even set quotas for the mail data. In other words, if a mail message exceeds certain size, it will not be delivered to its intended recipients. We propose a “Parcel Collection” approach for exchanging multimedia electronic mail messages. This approach for exchanging multimedia electronic mail messages integrates the current WWW technologies with the existing electronic mail systems.