Sample Cover Letter/E-mail (Prepared by Eldon Y. Li)

Date: mmm dd, yyyy

Dear Editor:

Enclosed is a paper, entitled "Mobile Agents for Network Management." Please accept it as a candidate for publication in the Special Issue of the [name of the journal] on "[theme of the special issue]". Below are our responses to your submission requirements.

1.  Title and the central theme of the article.

    Paper title: "Mobile Agents for Network Management." This study reviews the concepts of mobile agents and distributed network management system. It proposes a mobile agent-based implementation framework and creates a prototype system to demonstrate the superior performance of a mobile agent-based network over the conventional client-server architecture in a large network environment.
2.  Which subject/theme of the Journal the material fits 3.  Why the material is important in its field and why the material should be published in the Journal?
The necessity of having an effective computer network is rapidly growing alongside the implementation of information technology. Finding an appropriate network management system has become increasingly important today's distributed environment. However, the conventional centralized architecture, which routinely requests the status information of local units by the central server, is not sufficient to manage the growing requests. Recently, a new framework that uses mobile agent technology to assist the distributed management has emerged. The mobile agent reduces network traffic, distributes management tasks, and improves operational performance. Given today's bandwidth demand over the Internet, it is important for the Journal readers to understand this technology and its benefits. This study gives a real-life example of how to use mobile agents for distributed network management. It is the first in the literature that reports the analysis of network performance based on an operational prototype of mobile agent-based distributed network. We strongly believe the contribution of this study warrants its publication in the Journal.
4.  Names, addresses, and email addresses of four experts in the subject of your paper who are personally unknown to you*, are not members of the editorial board of the journal, are not from your* institution and at least two of whom must be from different countries from you*. (*N.B. "you" refers to all authors of the paper)
Prof. Dr. William Gates
Chair Professor of Information Technology
321 Johnson Hall 
Premier University 
Lancaster, NY 00012-6666, USA 
phone: +1-888-888-8888 
fax: +1-888-888-8886
e-mail: [email protected] 

Expertise: published a related paper ("TCP/IP and OSI: Four Strategies for Interconnection") in CACM, 38(3), pp. 188-198.

Relationship: I met Dr. Gate only once at a conference in 1999. I didn’t know him personally.

Assoc Prof. Dr. John Adams
Director of Network Research Center
College of Business 
Australian University
123, Harbor Drive 
Sydney, Australia 56789 
phone: +61-8-8888-8888 
fax: +61-8-8888-8886
e-mail: [email protected]

Expertise: published a related paper ("Creating Mobile Agents") in IEEE TOSE, 18(8), pp. 88-98.

Relationship: None. I have never met Dr. Adams.

Assoc Prof. Dr. Chia-Ho Chen
Chair of MIS Department
College of Management 
Open University
888, Putong Road 
Keelung, Taiwan 100 
phone: +886-2-8888-8888 
fax: +886-2-8888-8886
e-mail: [email protected]

Expertise: published a related paper ("Network Management for E-Commerce") in IJ Electronic Business, 1(4), pp. 18-28.

Relationship: Former professor, dissertation chairman.

Mr. Frank Young
Partner, ABC Consulting
888, Seashore Highway
Won Kok, Kowloon
Hong Kong 
phone: +852-8888-8888 
fax: +852-8888-8886
e-mail: [email protected]

Expertise: Mr. Young provides consulting services extensively to his clients regarding network management practices.

Relationship: I have worked with Mr. Young in several consulting projects in the past three years.

Finally, this paper is our original unpublished work and it has not been submitted to any other journal for reviews.

Sincerely,

Johnny Smith