The design and implementation of the Montage multimedia mail system

The Montage multimedia electronic mail system is presented along with its model for multimedia documents. Montage makes use of a simpler format than more generalized hypermedia systems. It is the authors' belief that the Montage model is more effective than general hypertext for the task of creating user-to-user messages. Furthermore, Montage is designed to be runtime extensible to novel media types by its users. Thus the system does not have to know ahead of time all the possible media users may want to send. The system is built on top of existing mail transport protocols for flexibility and portability. A discussion is presented of the design of the mailer along with experiences gained from its implementation. The user interface to the system is also presented.<>