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 sender-side 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.