Browsing Electronic Mail: Experiences Interfacing a Mail System to a DBMS

A database management system provides the ideal support for electronic mail applications. The Walnut mail system built at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center was recently redesigned to take better advantage of its underlying database facilities. The ability to pose ad-hoc queries with a “fill-in-the-form” browser allows people to browse their mail quickly and effectively, while database access paths guarantee fast retrieval of stored information. Careful consideration of the systems’ usage was reflected in both the database schema representation and the user-interface for browsing mail.