Choosing Your Email Software

You work in an academic environment that depends for its success on widespread collaboration, and email is an essential communications tool. However, your specific email needs may not have been considered by all software vendors. For example, many of the popular software packages you see advertised are designed primarily to meet the needs of a small business environment or workgroup.

While such workgroup-oriented email software can facilitate small group interaction and problem solving, it often presents problems for people in a research and education environment who need to use email to facilitate collaboration with colleagues using diverse computing environments worldwide, in addition to locally.

For example, Microsoft Mail is a popular workgroup email program that runs on PCs and Macintosh computers. Unfortunately, it is not based on the email standards used in the global Internet network.

This incompatibility means that an additional computer (called a gateway) is necessary to allow Microsoft Mail users to exchange messages via the global Internet. The same is true for cc:Mail, Quickmail, MHS, and other proprietary workgroup-oriented email systems.

Gateways should be avoided whenever possible for the following reasons:

• They are frequently points of failure in an email system. Such failures can delay or prevent email from reaching its destination--and when email fails anywhere, it becomes an issue for the sender of the mail, the would-be recipient, and every related support group in between, wherever they are in the world.
• Even a gateway does not guarantee full compatibility with global Internet standards. For example, many workgroup-oriented email systems provide a proprietary method for you to exchange files such as spreadsheets and word-processing documents with people using identical software. However, the vendor's gateway product may not know how to translate to/from the Internet standard format for such attachments.

• A gateway-free email architecture.
• An email program that is fully compatible with the global Internet network's email standards, including a new standard that allows you to exchange files such as spreadsheets and word-processing documents. (Internet standards for electronic mail include RFC-821--Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP), RFC-822--Email header definition, and RFC-1341--Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME).)

• An email program based on a client-server protocol that allows you to reach your email from any location on the network and from different types of computers. (Remote mailbox access is best provided via RFC-1176--Interactive Mail Access Protocol (IMAP).)

The C&C-supported email programs that offer you all of these features are listed in the following table.

Email Programs Supported by C&C

Operating System    Email Program

Unix                   Pine
DOS                    PC-Pine
Macintosh              Mailstrom
NeXT                   EasyMail, MailManager

You will find more information in this issue on C&C supported email tools and the standards and protocols they use including MIME and IMAP. Look for the email icon.