The idea

Mobile agent are a competitive concept of client-server computing and are especially suitable in mobile environments, that are characterized by low bandwidth communication facilities and ad hoc connection/disconnection to stationary systems. They can be used for information retrieval and information filtering, in which case they evaluate replies and return only the relevant data. Mobile agents as a metophor of active objects are created on a mobile device such as a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), will be launched into the information galaxy and are fulfilling the mobile user's task on the services available on networked stationary systems. One transmission channel for these itinerant agents is email. This paper introduces ACTIVEM3 as an example of an active mail framework, which can be regarded as a first approach in authoring mobile agents in a graphical interactive manner. ACTIVEM3 integrates two known concepts: active Mail and multimedia mail. The idea of active or computational m ail has existed since 1976; transfer programs embedded in standard mail which automatically execute at the receivers site. This hiker - the acitve mail message - can also carry multimedia elements (audio, animation, image etc. and indeed sub-agents) ub gus backpack, which it can also render and orchestrate at the receivers site in a sophisticated manner. Therefore, synchronization concepts are introduced. To summarize, the objective of ACTIVEM3 is the development and implementation of a system for the realization of active multimedia mail and a composing tool as an easy to use interactive authoring environment. An extension towards a more generalized authoring environment for this remote programming concept enables authoring of mobile agents. This paper introduced the basic ideas. The results of the proposed concept for a composer for active multimedia mail are presented through a realized prototype.