An active mail system

Abstract

Conventional electronic mail is passive text that is created, sent and read. Any further actions must be initiated by the recipient. By contrast, an "intelligent message" (imcssagc) is an active program that carries on a dialogue with the recipient. The imessage may subsequently route itself to other users as a result of the responses it receives, and it eventually returns these responses to the original sender. This paper describes a prototype intelligent mail system and discusses some of the problems involved in implementing such a system in a distributed environment.