"Media-on-demand" multimedia electronic mail: a tool for collaboration on the Web

Undoubtedly, multimedia electronic mail has many advantages in exchanging information electronically in collaborative work. The existing design of an e-mail systems architecture is inefficient in exchanging a multimedia message which has a much larger volume, and requires more bandwidth and storage space than the text-only messages. We present an innovative method for exchanging multimedia mail messages in a heterogeneous environment to support collaborative work over WWW on the Internet. We propose a "Parcel Collection" approach for exchanging multimedia electronic mail messages. This approach for exchanging multimedia electronic mail messages integrates the current WWW technologies with the existing electronic mail systems.