Multimedia E-mail: the Evolution Approach Based on Adapters

A lot of current e-mail systems are ASCII text-based, e.g. the e-mail system in Internet. In the coming era of multimedia, e-mails will be composed of other non-text-based information. This paper presents an evolution approach to enhance the capabilities of the current text-based e-mail systems. Using the proposed approach, an adapter is added to the top of the current system. As a result, multimedia e-mails can be transmitted without changing the kernel part of the existing systems. We also propose an encoding scheme that has a 7/8 bandwidth utilization rate. Using this encoding scheme, all of the non-ASCII data formats, e.g. image, voice, graphics, and so on, will be transformed to the ASCII data formats. Recently, we have developed an experimental multimedia e-mail system using the proposed method. Our system has been developed on SUN SPARC workstations and an X-window-based user-interface is provided in the system.