MULTIMEDIA ELECTRONIC MAIL - WILL THE DREAM BECOME A REALITY
Text-only electronic mail (email) is a widely used and increasingly appreciated medium for interpersonal communications. As such, it is clearly a technological success story. For many years, researchers have sought to extend and enhance this successful technology by augmenting it to permit the exchange of multimedia messages. Multimedia email can permit correspondents to exchange formatted text, pictures, animations, audio, video, and more. Yet despite years of interest and a number of highly visible and usable prototypes, multimedia mail has failed to achieve widespread use. Why is this so, and what are the future prospects for multimedia mail?
multimedia electronic mail electronic mail exchange standards interchange formats