Larger groups with email problems currently asked for change to more compatible email systems for better cross platform clients. Remote computing and the need for easy access to email when working remotely is growing. Many asked for information on training and where to go for help. People want to be able to know that their email and any attachments they send have a reasonable chance of arriving and being read successfully by their recipients. Some pointed to what is a crisis situation in that enormous amounts of time and energy are currently being wasted with our present, sometimes incompatible email systems or lack of education in how to best use them.
Many groups can now send and receive email including attachments with relative success.
But when email fails, it can waste enormous resources. Some groups are planning to change their email server and client software to ensure a higher degree of compatibility with other internal and outside users. As electronic messaging moved away from ascii text and incorporated a variety of enhancements such as enclosures, formatting, and more, the complications of varied document formats, compression technologies and types, and encoding methods led to a byzantine mix of problems. People use proprietary applications with little regard for the recipient or lacking information from them have no idea what applications they have, and what email or other tools they have on hand to deal with enclosures. Using criteria such as cross platform compatibility, cost and widespread availability the EMTF narrowed the field of client email software we needed to compare.