Bringing application services and users together-the electronic mail example

More and more people are using electronic mail systems. However, virtually no efforts have been made to examine in how far services provided by these systems really meet the actual user requirements. As an initial step, a rough analysis of user demands is given. This is followed by a brief introduction to CCITT´s X.400/X.500 recommendations, which will form the basis of all future multivendor mail systems. Services defined in these recommendations are matched against the idenitfied requirements. Finally, some useful enhancements of X.400/X.500 are proposed