VistaMail: An Integrated Multimedia Mailing System

13 I magine sitting at your desk at home and checking your electronic mail. An audiovisual clip of your family members hundreds of miles away pops up with warm greetings and family news. This scenario lies within the capability of the integrated multimedia mailing system, called VistaMail, developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. VistaMail provides smooth and seamless transitions among the creation, transmission, reception, and display of e-mail messages composed of audio, video, and text. It integrates the entire process— from the creation of audio, video, and text by the sender to its final synchronized presentation to the receiver. While other mailing systems might support video and audio media as attachments, they do not offer the same integrated capability. VistaMail messages represent a fundamental shift in how people perceive e-mail messages. Video and audio are no longer considered special additions to a text e-mail message. Instead, the combination of text, audio, and video constitute the e-mail message. People often find it difficult to gauge the tone of a text-only e-mail message. Many people have used emoticons (smileys) to convey their emotions. Audio and video can convey true emotions accurately without emoticons. The integrated nature of VistaMail brings a more personal touch to e-mail messages. This article presents the design and implementation challenges that arose during the development of VistaMail. We explore issues concerning media processing, mailing, and management functions within the system architecture, services, and graphical user interface. Finally, we discuss user experiences with the system based on our observations. 3-7 standards. Although the X.420 standard was expanded to support videotex and telefax, it does not include any specification for multimedia message types such as audio and video. In contrast, MIME can attach message types such as audio, video, and images to the body of text e-mail messages sent by SMTP. Support for composition and playback of mul-timedia messages requires extensions to traditional text-based systems. Most current e-mail systems need external applications so that users can view the multimedia components. As audio and video messages become more common, increased support for these message types will become available. Many of the systems described below are external players or recorders, which cannot send messages themselves. As a result, the process of sending and receiving multimedia messages becomes difficult and inconvenient. For example, a video or audio message must first be recorded with the external application and then saved to the …