Wang Laboratories, Inc.

Garry W Sager

John Martin Pratt

An electronic mail facility for dynamically adding a direct electronic mail capability to applications programs in a computer system having an integrated operating environment and connected to a plurality of electronic mail systems and including mail modules providing a drivers and interfaces to the mail systems, an administrative module, a user interface and a data interface. The administrative module includes a mail system manger including a mail system detector for detecting each of the mail systems and a mail system table for selecting and enabling a current one of the electronic mail modules and an application program manager for detecting the invocation of an application program to be supported by the electronic mail facility. The user interface includes user interface modifiers, each including a user interface representation of an electronic mail operation and an electronic mail procedure, including resources, scripts and macros, and drag and drop icons. The user interface is to an application invocation by modifying the user interface of the executable copy of the invoked application program to include the user interface representation of an electronic mail operation. The modified executable copy of the application program is responsive to a user invocation of an electronic mail operation for invoking the corresponding electronic mail procedure. The data interfaces include the data transfer functions of the integrated operating environment and are responsive to the mail procedures for communicating data from the application program to the current mail interface module.

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Ashburnham, MA, United States of America

Garry W Sager