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Electronic Mail Task Force
Office Systems Working Group

Background

The Electronic Mail Task Force Office Working Group has been working since Summer 1993 to define the next generation office systems architecture for Penn. A comprehensive needs assessment was conducted in the fall of 1993 (available via anonymous ftp) which culminated in the presentation of a draft document for comment to the campus in December 1993 (an executive summary is also available).

During the following year, the Working Group evaluated products for recommendation to the Penn community. Three functional tensions could not be resolved at that time:

• the need to attach arbitrary binary files to messages
• the need to integrate the user-interface with desktop computers
• the need for location independent access to electronic mail

The host-based Elm is the dominant product used by students on campus. It offers good location-independence (since it is host based and can run from any desktop), and has a MIME implementation (though it is difficult to use). It does not, however, support the kind of graphical user interface that users have come to expect. Many administrators, and an increasing number of students (especially in ResNet) use Eudora, a POP-based mail product, which offers a good desktop interface and good support for MIME, but offers poor location independence since POP-based mail products usually download the mail to a users desktop. Reading mail from another desktop is difficult.

The Working Group continued to try products primarily from three companies that seemed to be working toward the same set of functions -- Siren Software with SirenMail, ISA Corp with ECSmail, and NCD/Z-Code with Z-Mail. These companies did not complete products to meet Penn's functional requirements.

Electronic Mail Initiatives Elsewhere

So you want to know all about MIME, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, the standard for exchanging binary documents via electronic mail? Read the Usenet MIME FAQ!

The University of Michigan Computing Environment's IMAP E-mail Service.

How does CMU organize its email addressing and serve directory information

And what is CMU's Project Cyrus?

Eudora home page

Steve Dorner, the original author of Eudora, and QUEST are reportedly not very interested in meeting Penn's functional requirements, and will stick with POP instead of moving to IMAP, according to this interview with Pete Resnick. This is kind of a shame.

EMTF

Please note: This material is no longer current and appears online for archival purposes only. Use the search and navigation tools above to locate more up-to-date materials, if they exist.