Mail servers with embedded data compression mechanisms

Abstract

Summary form only given. Typically, e-mail messages are moved across the Internet using the Simple Mail Transfer protocol (SMTP) which utilizes the connection-oriented Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to establish connections between two mail servers. The POP3 (Post Office Protocol) is used to retrieve the mail for individual users from a server. We designed and implemented e-mail servers that contain embedded data compression mechanisms; the SMTP protocol is extended to allow for the mail client and server to negotiate compression which is transparent to the users and the new servers are backward-compatible with traditional mail servers. The LZSS compression algorithm is used to carry out the data compression. Different kinds of mail data were used to test the e-mail system. Textural data, binary data, and graphical data were transported across the Internet using the designed e-mail system. Several Windows NT hosts were identified for this experiment. These hosts were connected with the Internet.