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From: jdudeck@POLYSLO.CALPOLY.EDU (John R. Dudeck)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso.x400
Subject: Research areas in E-mail
Message-ID: <25ce0b88.5151@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU>
Date: 5 Feb 90 23:26:00 GMT
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Reply-To: jdudeck@polyslo.calpoly.edu (John R. Dudeck)
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I am currently a Master's degree student in Computer Science at Cal Poly in 
San Luis Obispo, California.  I need to find a topic for my Master's project 
and thesis.

I am especially interested in the field of E-mail and X.400.  In the responses 
received from a previous posting, a few of you made remarks about some of the 
areas where work needs to be done.  Pierre Andre Pays suggested that I should 
not stay too close to X.400, but to branch out some distance from it.  He 
mentioned use of X.400 for file transfer, distributed conferencing systems, 
groupware, and X.500 as topics his students have worked on.  Other areas he 
mentioned are EDI, EFT and security.

Another very interesting start of a discussion concerned the comparison of 
telefax with teletext, and the fact that fax succeeded where teletext did not, 
because of 1) the simplicity of fax, 2) documents could be prepared without 
special equipment, and 3) the fax machine connects to an ordinary telephone 
without subscribing to a new service (Yonadav Perry & Jacob Palme).  Then 
Robert Smart brought up the area of the possibility of PC-to-PC email that 
works just the way fax does, without going through a store-and-forward email 
service.

So here is my request:  Would some of you like to give my your personal list 
of topics that need to be worked on in the field of E-mail?

And while we are at it, what do you think of the idea of PC-to-PC email a la 
fax?  Would it be a good idea as a product, or would it just confuse things?  
What are the problems associated with doing this?


-- 
John Dudeck                           "You want to read the code closely..." 
jdudeck@Polyslo.CalPoly.Edu             -- C. Staley, in OS course, teaching 
ESL: 62013975 Tel: 805-545-9549          Tanenbaum's MINIX operating system.