Functional Profiles For Messaging Applications Using Internet Mail

Building functional profiles for typical applications is standard practice in ISO environments in contrast to the Internet, where service implementations are developed in a fierce competition market with time-to-market as the measure of success. Interoperability in information infrastructure is usually achieved by functional standardization or middleware services deployment. This paper delves on ensuring interoperability for messaging applications based on Internet mail by using the functional profiles definition approach. Overview of Internet mail standards is given and appropriate taxonomy for Internet message handling profiles is proposed. Functional profiles for Internet messaging are identified considering secure and unsecure message transfer. Five typical messaging scenarios are discussed considering the proposed profiles.