MOBILE E-MAIL DOCUMENT TRANSACTION SERVICE

A system is presented for transmitting document references or tokens to users of integrated wireless and wire-based communication services. The system includes workstations, files servers, printers and other devices coupled to a wire-based network. Mobile computing devices are coupled to the wire-based network through either IR (infrared) or RF (radio) transceiver gateways. Each mobile computing device appears to hold a uses personal collection of documents: the device is programmed to receive, transmit, and store document tokens. A document services request available to users of the mobile computing devices is an email-to-token service. Using this service, document tokens are emailed to recipients with an email account. The transmission protocol for performing the email-to-token service includes the step of transmitting a token-to-email service request from the mobile computing device over the wireless communication service to a token-enabled server located on the wire-based network. The token-enabled server accepts a document token and retrieves from a file server on the wire-based network a document identified by the document token. Subsequently, the token-enabled server sends the identified document in an email message to an email address specified by the user.