| 摘要 |
The contents of a pair of mailboxes (21, 31), one of which resides in an e-mail system (29) and the other of which resides in a voice-mail system (39), are automatically synchronized both in message content and in message state by a synchronizer (10), even though messages in the two mailboxes may have different data structures and carry information expressed in different media and having different formats. Synchronization is effected by automatically creating a corresponding message in one mailbox for every message that arrives in the othermailbox of the mailbox pair. If the corresponding message does not contain all of the information carried by the original message -- for example, because some information in the original message is expressed in a medium or has a format that is incompatible, or cannot be made compatible by conversion, with the other system --a partial-copy indication (217) is raised for the corresponding message, and thebehavior of synchronization is altered to protect the original message contents. The behavior of synchronization may also be tailored to accommodate automatic message expiration, or to synchronize message-header notifications only.
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