Towards a unified messaging environment over the Internet

The Internet's increasing popularity and widespread acceptance have prompte d its use as an alternative medium for fax, voice, and video communications to reduce cost by circumventing expensive international toll rates. Unifie d messaging integrates different media such as facsimile, text mail, voice mail, video mail, and pager-messages into a single mechanism for message su bmission, transportation, and retrieval. In this paper, a unified messaging environment over the Internet is proposed. This environment essentially co mprises two gateways, namely, the front end gateway (FEG) and the back end gateway (BEG) to provide the necessary support for message dispatch anti re trieval. Front end gateway is responsible for the message dispatch process including submission, preprocessing, packaging, and Internet delivery, whil e BEG uses a dual-contact technique for delivery of the unified message to the recipient over packet switched telephone network and the: Web. The two gateways can be combined into a unified messaging gateway (UMG) system.