The BERKOM Multimedia-Mail Teleservice

A Multimedia-Mail Teleservice based on CCITT Recommendation X.400(88) is under development within the BERKOM project funded by the German PTT. The traditional text exchange is being enriched by supporting multimedia information in the form of text, images, video, audio as well as documents. The problems caused within the message transfer system by the expected large messages in case of e.g. video are solved by complementing the store-and-forward mechanism inherent to electronic mail by an additional exchange mechanism. This mechanism allows the resolution of references to message content. Such reference may be put into a message in oplace of the content itself. OSI/X.400 and Internet/MIME interworking, asynchronous information server access via Multimedia-Mail as well as possible future developments are discussed.