Towards a Unified Messaging Environment over the Internet

The Internet's increasing popularity and widespread acceptance have prompted its use as an alternative medium for fax, voice, and video communications to reduce cost by circumventing expensive international toll rates. Unified messaging integrates different media such as facsimile, text mail, voice mail, video mail, and pager-messages into a single mechanism for message submission, transportation, and retrieval. In this paper, a unified messaging environment over the Internet is proposed. This environment essentially comprises two gateways, namely, the front end gateway FEG and the back end gateway BEG to provide the necessary support for message dispatch and retrieval. Front end gateway is responsible for the message dispatch process including submission, preprocessing, packaging, and Internet delivery, while BEG uses a dual-contact technique for delivery of the unified message to the recipient over packet switched telephone network and the Web. The two gateways can be combined into a unified messaging g...