An electronic mail client system, comprising: a) a plurality of authoring/reading components for creating and viewing representations of information; b) encoding means for automatically encoding representations created with said authoring/reading components into an Internet compatible email message; and c) decoding means for automatically decoding said representations encoded by said encoding means, wherein at least one of said authoring/reading components is responsive to a role mode encoded in an email message whereby said role mode determines how much information in said email message will be displayed. view more

A method of corresponding by electronic mail, comprising: a) creating a representation of information; b) encoding the representation into an Internet-compatible email message; c) sending the email message to an email client; and d) decoding the email message at the email client, wherein the email client is responsive to a role mode encoded in the email message whereby the role mode determines how much information in said email message will be displayed by the email client, and the sender of the message controls the role mode. view more

An electronic mail client embodied in an executable computer-readable medium, comprising: a) a plurality of authoring and reading components, a first of said plurality of authoring components for creating a representation of a document including an other than text portion and for creating the other than text portion of the document; b) encoding means for automatically encoding said representation created with said authoring components into an Internet-compatible email message; and c) decoding means for automatically decoding said representation encoded by said encoding means, wherein said encoding means and said decoding means communicate bidirectionally with said authoring components. view more

An electronic mail client according to claim 1, wherein: said encoding means includes MIME-compatible encoding means.

A method of authoring a document and sending it by electronic mail, said method comprising: a) providing a document-authoring component which authors a portion of a document which is other than a plain-text; b) providing a document-encoding component which encodes the document as Internet-compatible email; c) linking the document-authoring component with the document encoding component such that documents generated under said document-authoring component are automatically encoded as Internet-compatible email. view more