Internet Mail User Experience in the Millennium

by Paul Hoffman, Internet Mail Consortium

Every year, people predict "more integration" in computer messaging, particularly in what the end user sees. However, that integration has been slowed by the popularity of proprietary software. Now that Internet messaging standards are becoming widely deployed, the long-predicted integration should become real in the next two to three years.
Although the integration will be visible to everyone, it will be most noticed by end users, whose mail clients will become the basis for much more than standard e-mail. Two other messaging technologies, fax and voice, will become terribly common for Internet mail users due to recent and forthcoming standards work.

Three Messages, One Inbox
Most people still think of e-mail, fax, and voice as three different kinds of messaging. The standardization of sending fax and voice messages over e-mail will help blur the boundaries for e-mail users, particularly those who use different mail clients at their desk and on the road.

Both the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) are working on standardizing transmission of fax messages over the Internet, and the outcome of their standardization work should start to ship in products within a year. Fax is a huge business throughout the world, and using the Internet to transmit fax images can greatly lower telephone costs, particularly for international companies.

Because the first round of fax-over-Internet standards is being completed now, the first round of Internet mail clients that handle standardized fax will become available by the end of this year.

It is likely that these features will evolve quickly, and by 2000 e-mail users will probably look at fax as a natural extension of their mail sending and receiving.

The Voice Profile for Internet Mail (VPIM) standard for moving voice between mail servers has been getting more attention now that multimedia mail clients have become the norm instead of the exception. The rapidly increasing availability of speakers on PCs, including laptops, have made Internet mail programs the perfect place to deliver voice mail.

Better Messages, More Messages
The user experience in 2000 will also be heavily influenced by the now-ubiquitous use of Multi-Purpose Mail Extensions (MIME) and the still-increasing popularity of Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML).

The popular mail clients already have good HTML rendering capabilities, and more and more personal e-mail is using simple HTML for things like boldface and tables.

In two years, however, it is likely that this trend will have moved further towards the full use of the MIME Encapsulation of Aggregate HTML Documents (MHTML) standard for multipart HTML documents. Today, users expect to see Web pages with both text and graphics on the same page; in two years, they'll expect to see the same in their Internet mail messages. MHTML mail clients will deliver this seamlessly.

The use of MIME will go beyond "mail me a Web page", however. Today, people think of MIME structure in their messages as "attachments", appendages to the main message. With MHTML, references to attachments will appear in the body of the message, giving more context to the files that come with the message, and thus making them more useful.

With these advances, Internet mail users will start receiving more messages than they do now because messaging will be used in some places that Web browsing is today. Instead of having to remember to go to a site every week to see if anything is new, the site will happily send you its content, assuring that you get what they want you to see and that you don't forget to come and get it.

Contacts Plus
There will be plenty of smaller changes in the user experience as well. New standards for calendaring and scheduling through e-mail are about to emerge, allowing personal information management (PIM) makers to more tightly integrate the calendar parts of their software to Internet mail. Drag-and-drop extensions will let typical users send and receive schedules with almost no effort.

Similarly, standards for the format of electronic business cards are also imminent, which will make filling e-mail address books much less painful. Being able to send a full business card that easily goes into the recipient's address book means that typical losses due to copying and pasting will disappear.

Further, the standardization of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) will also help Internet mail users who are trying to find the e-mail addresses of people they have never contacted. Within two years, it will be common to publish corporate white pages for both internal and external use so that Internet mail clients will be able to access these white pages, allowing senders to find their recipients without having to first use the telephone.

Paul Hoffman was invited by Messaging Magazine to write about Internet/Intranet Messaging as it relates to messaging in the millennium. Paul serves as track co-chair with David Crocker, both of the Internet Mail Consortium (IMC). Other tracks taking place at EMA'98 include Directory & Infrastructure Management, Security/Privacy and Electronic Commerce.