The Design and Implementation of the MONTAGE Multimedia Mail System

The chief advantage of such a system is the increased communication bandwidth between the users of the system. A multimedia mail system should allow people to communicate as freely and without restriction as conventional ‘‘paper’’ mail systems do. In current paper mail systems, users can seal most ABSTRACT Electronic mail systems capable of transmitting compositions consisting of various unconventional media (such as voice, video, and images) have attracted a substantial amount of interest in recent years. It is important that mailers capable of delivering such documents present them in an organized fashion. We present the Montage multimedia electronic mail system, along with its model for multimedia documents. Montage makes use of a simpler format than more generalized hypermedia systems. It is our belief that the Montage model is more effective than general hypertext for the task of creating user-to-user messages. Furthermore, Montage is designed to be runtime extensible to new media types by its users. Thus the system does not have to know ahead of time all the possible media users may want to send. The system is built on top of existing mail transport protocols for flexibility and portability. We discuss the design of the mailer along with experiences gained from its implementation. The user interface to the system is also presented.