E cient Management of Multimedia Attachments

In a modern heterogeneous environment where users use a variety of devices such as smart phones PDAs and laptops and a variety of network connections such as Wireless LAN and GPRS to connect to the email system handling of email and attachment messages and ensuring readability becomes an important management challenge In some cases it is necessary to transcode the multimedia attachment to a format supported by the recipient device and appropriate for the connection used in order to allow the recipients to view the multimedia attachment This transcoding could be done at the sender mail server the receiver mail server or at a proxy point in the middle In addition the message may be addressed to several recipients in the receiver server each may have di erent preferences and characterizations This paper proposes an e cient scheme for handling email messages with multimedia attachments We describe an architectural and algorithmic framework that allows service maximization to the end users depending on their devices and connectivity with minimum cost to the organizations in terms of storage transcoding and communication We also provide a simulation study indicating that the proposed scheme is feasible and results in very e cient solutions