E-Mail

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E-mail Summary

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E-Mail

E-mail, which is short for electronic mail, offers virtually instant, one-way communication around the world via computer. It was one of the first methods of person-to-person communication made available through the information superhighway. In the early days of e-mail, simple text messages were sometimes difficult to manage, and adding pictures or documents was possible only if other software was available to make transmission from e-mail to computer possible. Current e-mail software generally provides easy-to-use options for attaching photos, sounds, video clips, complete documents, and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) code.

Early e-mail access was typically provided by government agencies and universities to employees and special groups of people who needed to communicate with one another quickly and directly. Researchers and scientists were among the first consistent users of e-mail.

E-mail addresses are now available for a fee through commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to anyone who has a home computer and a phone line or other means of Internet access. Users who do not care to contract with an ISP can acquire e-mail addresses through a variety of Internet web sites; well-known examples of free e-mail providers include Hotmail.com, Juno.com, and Yahoo.com. Although there is no direct cost to the user for these addresses, the services come with a non-monetary price. Sites providing such e-mail accounts usually are supported by advertising, and the e-mail accounts are often targets of that advertising.

E-Mail Vs. Snail Mail

E-mail provides a format for written communication that is different from the traditional postal service in number of ways. Messages can be delivered more rapidly through electronic means than on paper through what has been nicknamed "snail-mail." E-mail is generally less formal than postal mail. Messages are often written quickly and respondents can weave their responses into the original message, replying point-by-point to the writer's questions or comments.

Among the advantages of e-mail are speed and convenience. One advantage to using e-mail is the ability to send the same information to a number of recipients easily and simultaneously, complete with electronic attachments. Sending a copy of a message to interested parties at the same time as the intended recipient can save time by ensuring that everyone knows the details and has a chance to respond as needed.

Electronic mail offers new forms of communication that cross barriers of time and geography. Groups of people with similar interests can join together to share and discuss ideas via e-mail discussion groups. Each group can generate hundreds of messages from hundreds or thousands of users within a day. In some cases, discussion groups are moderated, with all incoming messages going to a single person to be screened before they are posted. This protects the entire list of message recipients from receiving messages that are not relevant to the group's discussions. Other lists are not moderated, allowing any list member to send any message to the entire group.

E-mail retrieval centers are increasingly more available in public places such as bookstores and airports.

E-Mail Vs. Voice Communication

E-mail and telephone contact offer similar benefits in speed of contact. Answering machines and voice mail services provide options for asynchronous communication, similar to e-mail, where the recipient is able to receive messages on a time-delayed basis. With a sophisticated voice mail system, one message can be delivered simultaneously to a number of recipients on the same system, paralleling the ability of e-mail to communicate simultaneous messages and attachments to multiple recipients. This type of telephone delivery system is generally available only in business settings. One advantage of e-mail, however, is that it provides the option of communicating the same message to a number of people while also providing a text version of the message, instead of simply a voice message.

On the other hand, the voice message, whether live or recorded, offers certain advantages, as well. Listening to a voice message can give valuable information as to the emotional state of the speaker. Emotions conveyedthrough voice contact can clarify the meaning of a message that may be misinterpreted in e-mail format.

In an attempt to provide some emotional content to text-only messages, "emoticons" have been created; many are now widely recognizable. Emoticons consist of several keystrokes used together in a sequence to represent a facial expression. The most common are the use of a colon followed by a right or left parenthesis mark, representing a smiling face, or a frowning one, as in:) or :(respectively. Emoticons have become so popular that some word processing packages include smiling or frowning faces to replace typed in emoticons automatically.

Emoticons can be used to convey certain personal characteristics of a message's author as well. Emoticons can portray glasses, using the numeral 8 followed by a parenthesis mark, or a beard and a wink, made up of a semicolon, a parenthesis mark, and a right-facing angle bracket mark, as in 8) or;)> respectively.

E-Mail for Business Use

E-mail has become quite popular for many business uses beyond communication within or between companies. As mentioned earlier, some Internet sites offer free e-mail accounts to attract users to the sites. Many of these are supported by advertising that is targeted toward specific consumer profiles. E-mail lists are also a valuable advertising commodity. They are used much like mailing lists for postal mail, or telephone lists for telemarketing.

For e-mail users who find advertiser-provided information valuable, or at least interesting, these e-mail marketing techniques are not a problem. There are some less scrupulous advertisers who send unsolicited and frequently unwanted messages to large numbers of e-mail accounts. This is a process known as "spamming." E-mail spam is often sent to discussion groups' e-mail lists, especially those that are not moderated. Various ISPs, such as Mindspring/Earthlink, offer their customers spam-filters such as the "Spaminator."

Although e-mail has been fully adopted by business, government, industry, education, and the private sector, concerns about security and privacy still exist. E-mail software and ISPs offer varying levels of security in the e-mail packages they provide. While most providers offer a security level that most personal users find fairly reasonable, there are questions of security in business settings that must be addressed, not only to avoid spam, but to avoid unauthorized access to e-mail messages and accounts. People with significant computer skills can circumvent security systems and illegally access e-mail accounts. There are constant improvements made to security for all types of computer networks, including e-mail, but there will always be hackers who respond to every advance in security with new efforts to break through security measures.

E-mail privacy is not only at risk through illegal activity. In most business settings, there are regulations about who has legal access to e-mail sent or received via company-provided accounts. It may be true that e-mail sent with a company-provided account is not accessible to anyone from outside the company, but each e-mail message may be considered company property and can legally be accessed by the appropriate department within thecompany. On occasion, corporate employees have been fired for using their company e-mail accounts in ways deemed inappropriate by their employers. Such objectionable use of company e-mail has included illegal betting, sending off-color jokes, forwarding chain letters, and sending pornographic photos.

E-mail accounts and messages may also be vulnerable to legal investigations. In the late 1990s and subsequent years, questions arose concerning e-mail contacts that U.S. President Bill Clinton made during ongoing legal investigations. Those e-mail messages were evaluated based on their content and their relevance to the investigations. Internet service providers were asked to provide information about account holders, who were then placed under investigation themselves.

E-mail provides a rapid and comprehensive method of communicating with others. Its low cost and widespread availability makes it a valuable tool for business and personal use. Advances in software and hardware are expected to help alleviate the privacy and security concerns that limit its use for highly confidential correspondence.

Shirley Campbell