INTERNET MESSAGING FRAMEWORKS

Electronic mail (e-mail) has become an important fool for companies to use to conduct their businesses. With the introduction of the World W ide Web, awareness of the existence of the Internet has exponentially increased over the last two years, and people are starting to realize that there is more to the Internet than just the Web. Companies are ex panding their use of e-mail from internal to external. But the large s et of proprietary, noninteroperable e-mail systems make this more of a trip through a jungle than a drive along the information highway. Mos t approaches to overcome the connectivity problems use gateways to con vert between the proprietary format and the Internet standards. These conversions are lossy at best; hence, most proprietary system vendors are revamping their systems to base them on Internet standards. this p aper summarizes the current state of the most important Internet stand ards related to e-mail and the general state of proprietary e-mail sys tems. If then introduces a set of technologies we developed to solve t he complex problem of evolving from proprietary to Internet-standards- based e-mail systems. We have structured these technologies into Inter net Messaging Frameworks.