It's still the killer app
E-mail: the electronic postal service. In a world before affordable fax machines, e-mail was a useful tool for researchers, academicians and government employees who needed to share reports, images, databases and other documents quickly and accurately.
In just a few years, though, electronic mail moved from simply being a useful tool to a necessity in the arsenal of business tools. No business card is complete without at least one e-mail address. In fact, e-mail is the most often used service of the Internet, and it's easy to see why.
E-mail offers communication and community to individuals and groups in our increasingly fractured society. Children can keep in touch with parents across the continent, international students can connect with friends and relatives back home, and even closed, totalitarian societies find it difficult to block e-mail from emigrees working to reform their native society using email.
To send e-mail to someone, you must know the person's address. With the proper address, your service provider and the Internet will route the message to its destination. If you don't know the address, try the FAQ site on finding people on the Internet, or check two of the most popular and complete directories: WhoWhere? and Four11.
There are two important points you should always remember about using e-mail:
- E-mail doesn't enjoy the same legal right to privacy as a letter sent through the postal service in an envelope. Think of e-mail as a postcard anyone can peek at. Many companies have policies declaring that employee e-mail is not private. If your company has a policy in place, then it's not private.
- Because of the way e-mail is transmitted through the Internet (see the section on the evolve.shtml"> evolution of the Internet) your message — or parts of it — may remain on every intermediate host computer through which it passes.
A good rule, then, is never to use e-mail for anything you can't later defend or explain away. If you're still unsure, check out the Beginner's Guide to Effective Email.
Meanwhile, test your e-mail skills by sending a message from our electronic postcard service, Postcards from the Edge in cyberspace.
