Synchronized Multimedia within Active Email Messages

Multimedia electronic mail is concernde with the transmission of multimedia information, like images, audio and video objects within email. Most systems proposing multimedia mail do not offer a suitable expression and graphical interactive composition of spatioal and temporal relationships among message objects. Within this summary, the authors sketch an authoring method and synchroniyation description based on the concept of an active email message. Teh active part of such a message -the program- automatically executes at the email receivers site and can, for instance, orchestrate the presentation of the multimedia information. The introduced synchroniyation concepts are implemented within ActiveM3, an authoring system for the graphical interactive composition of active email messages. The system and the active email message are based on Java and MIME.