Continuous Media E-mail on the Internet: Infrastructure Inadequacies and a Sender-Side Solution

This paper examines how the Internet's e-mail infrastructure should evolve to better support continuous media (CM) e-mail, such as audio and video. We assert that the problem is not simply a matter of adding the obvious new functionality to user agents (mail readers), such as audio and video capture, but requires the adoption of a new delivery model. We do this by examining the problems that arise using current methods to deliver video messages, and we show how senderside storage and media streaming solve these problems. Finally, we describe an implementation strategy that requires changes only to individual sender systems, but enables CM e-mail to be delivered universally to any recipient, thus providing a realistic evolutionary path that can be adopted incrementally by individual mail systems.