Internet Messaging

Feature
Internet Messaging I

Adapted from the Prentice-Hall text Internet Messaging, From the
Desktop to the Enterprise, by David Strom and Marshall T. Rose.

Problems

You start out with what you think is a simple enough task: You wish to publish a weekly electronic newsletter for your department. You have recognized the need for your newsletter ever since several of your colleagues asked you the same series of questions about project status. For the moment, you compose a separate e-mail message whenever you get a request from one of your coworkers. It’s tedious, even using the cut and paste features of your word processor so that you don’t have to retype the message. But you’d like something more elegant.

How do you do it without spending a great deal of time and money for new software? You don’t want to build any new systems, let alone maintain them for this task.

Think for a moment what a print publisher goes through in the process of getting out a new edition of a magazine or a newspaper. He or she first has to know the intended audience of the publication, either by doing surveys or by interviewing subscribers directly, so that the content matches the readers’ interests. Then he or she has to have writers prepare the content, editors correct it and other people produce it in a form that is pleasing to the eye, taking into consideration choice of graphics, colors and format. Then a printer has to produce the pages, collate them and mail them to the readers. That is a lot of work.

An electronic publisher goes through a similar process, whether on the small scale of our departmental newsletter, or on a bigger scale with an audience of thousands of readers. The only difference is the end product is bits, not paper. But still someone must take the time to understand the needs of the intended audience, prepare the content and make it pleasant to read. And the content has to be delivered to the readers as well.

The challenge of being your own publisher isn’t the only issue faced when sending e-mail from your desktop. You also have to keep track of various e-mail address lists and try to figure out ways to send e-mail directly from your desktop applications. We’ll cover these issues in this section.