CONVERSATIONS.

A new high-level computer mail service is described that is based on conversations rather than independent memos. Conversations have the advantage of being more consistent with the way humans communicate. Conversation-based mail also supports various message-exchange paradigms such as memo communication, mailing lists, and journals. Messages are grouped into conversations, with messages within a conversation ordered according to the context in which they are written. Message context defines a relation between messages that makes it easy to implement conversations in a distributed environment.