jdudeck@POLYSLO.CALPOLY.EDU (John R. Dudeck) (02/06/90)
I am currently a Master's degree student in Computer Science at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California. I need to find a topic for my Master's project and thesis. I am especially interested in the field of E-mail and X.400. In the responses received from a previous posting, a few of you made remarks about some of the areas where work needs to be done. Pierre Andre Pays suggested that I should not stay too close to X.400, but to branch out some distance from it. He mentioned use of X.400 for file transfer, distributed conferencing systems, groupware, and X.500 as topics his students have worked on. Other areas he mentioned are EDI, EFT and security. Another very interesting start of a discussion concerned the comparison of telefax with teletext, and the fact that fax succeeded where teletext did not, because of 1) the simplicity of fax, 2) documents could be prepared without special equipment, and 3) the fax machine connects to an ordinary telephone without subscribing to a new service (Yonadav Perry & Jacob Palme). Then Robert Smart brought up the area of the possibility of PC-to-PC email that works just the way fax does, without going through a store-and-forward email service. So here is my request: Would some of you like to give my your personal list of topics that need to be worked on in the field of E-mail? And while we are at it, what do you think of the idea of PC-to-PC email a la fax? Would it be a good idea as a product, or would it just confuse things? What are the problems associated with doing this? -- John Dudeck "You want to read the code closely..." jdudeck@Polyslo.CalPoly.Edu -- C. Staley, in OS course, teaching ESL: 62013975 Tel: 805-545-9549 Tanenbaum's MINIX operating system.
pays@emsesmc.emse.fr (Paul-Andre PAYS) (02/06/90)
Let me add a few other comments, 1. some other topics distributed management of a domain or a set of cooperating domains (I am speaking of MHS domains, in the broad acceptance, ie obviously including X.400 MTA and UA, but also X.500, and for a lot of time also RFC-987 gatewaying with RFC mail systems). It is for example a very important issue for RARE, which we are currently investigating. (you may contact kaddour@cambur.emse.fr). security in MHS essential for wide acceptance in commercial organisations and use such as EDI or EFT. Again, this is closely related to X.500 DS. multimedia aspects. issues how to represent the time as a structuring element in a a multimedia document (eg this sound must be played, while presenting this part of the text...)? data compression? and user interfaces ergonomy for such things? 2. PC to PC mail? I have personnaly some doubt about a pure PC to PC approach. . this already exist, is very limited, is outside the standard move . either you will never have something pewerfull, or you will bring to pC user all the burden of MHS management . I cann't imagine MHS without DS (at least in the near future), do you plan to integrate x.500 on the PC too... There something that seems nice for this purpose and that is part of the standard: I mean the P7 MS (message store) approach why not study carefully this one before starting something new, and may be complete or make suggestions on how to extend it or integrate it better with other PC based services (fax, telex...) -- PAP a