What Is Email and Why Should I Use It?
The word "email" is short for "electronic mail". It is exactly that: the electronic equivalent of the kind of mail you send in an envelope with a postage stamp attached. There are differences, however, between how normal mail and electronic mail work. If you spend a few minutes to understand these differences, it will help you understand how to use email more easily.
One of the nice differences between email and regular mail is convenience. An email user can sit at her computer, compose a quick message, and send it off to one or many people in seconds. No stamp is required, and no time is taken to physically take the letter to a mail drop. Many people now use email to communicate with their extended family, who may be spread out geographically. This can allow more frequent communication at a lower price than the telephone. My family does this, and we now communicate much more often than before. (If we did this by regular mail or phone, some of us would have missed the story of the spider in Becky's ear, and that would have been a shame.)
Another major advantage of email over regular mail is immediacy. Even with special couriers, moving paper from one place to another places necessary limits on how quickly it can be accomplished. With email, the theoretical limit is the speed of light. At 186,000 miles per second, it's hard for the FedEx guy to compete. In many businesses, use of email is no longer really an option. If they are to remain competitive, they MUST use email.
A third good reason to use email is environmental. Email messages do not ever have to be printed to be useful. This means that no trees have to be killed, no toner cartridges have to be disposed of, etc. Unlike faxes, the quality of the email is as good as the original when it is printed (unless the printer used is low quality).
Presumably you understand how regular mail (sometimes referred to as "snail mail" because of the relative speed of transmission) works, so we'll skip describing how the postal system works. Email has some similarities, but also some key differences. First, let's try to understand a little about how email works, without getting too technical.
Don't confuse email with facsimile (fax) transmission. A fax machine takes a piece of paper and reproduces the image on a piece of paper on the other fax machine. It does not matter what is on the paper, whether it is words, pictures or smudges. A fax also is a connection over the phone lines between exactly two machines. You cannot send the same fax to multiple places simultaneously, as you can with email. It is, however, nearly as fast as email, and computer compatibility issues don't exist, since facsimile transmission is very well standardized. Faxes are a very good alternative where the number of pages to be transmitted is fairly small, telephone charges are not an issue, and the quality of the received document is not crucial.
Email is simply a standardized system for passing data from one computer to another. Like any such system, there is a protocol for how it gets from one place to another, and what type of data can be sent. To get email from the writer's computer to the intended recipient's computer, it must have an "email address", similar to a street address used in snail mail. This address will be something like "janedoe@serviceprovider.com", where the "janedoe" part is the recipient's user identification, and "serviceprovider.com" indicates the internet service provider used by Jane Doe (like aol.com). The email is sent from the writer's computer through the internet, passed from computer to computer until it gets to the proper service provider's computer. Once it is there, it will remain in a holding area on the computer until the recipient "janedoe" retrieves it. (The exception would be if Jane Doe's computer is always connected to her service provider. In that case, the message would be instantly made available to her. This is typically only the case when people are at work; most of us cannot afford to be permanently connected to the internet at home. Yet.)
SECURITY
Email is not perfect; it does have some disadvantages when compared to snail mail or facsimile. One disadvantage is that when you send email (outside of your immediate office environment), it is not always easy to tell if the recipient has received it. Fortunately, this has become a much smaller problem in recent years than it used to be and is not generally a very serious concern.
Another issue exists with this transmission system: it is not secure. Generally, when you send letters through the U.S. Postal System, you can expect that no one can read it along the way. Sending email is more like sending a postcard than a letter, in that it is possible for a message to be read by someone along the route and sent on, undetectable to either the sender or recipient. (It is possible to avoid this problem by using encryption, but that is beyond the scope of this article.) It should be noted that faxes do not have this problem. A fax can be intercepted, but it would require a "tap" on one of the phone lines, something which is blatantly illegal (without a court order) and which rarely occurs.
Fortunately, snooping on email transmissions is also not a major concern, mostly because of the vast volume of messages that would have to be read to be of interest to the snooper. Most email traffic is really not confidential or even understandable to someone other than the recipient. In general, if you are going to send trade secrets or extremely sensitive information, you probably should not use email without encryption. Use good judgment.
Email is most useful for personal and regular interoffice communication. It will be some time before it replaces systems such as registered mail. It also should be noted that some email is not really open to random snooping. This is the case when email is sent from one person to another where both use the same service provider, or are connected on a network (such as within the same law firm). One exception exists: one person who should be able to see such email messages is the network administrator. People have been quite embarrassed (or even have lost their jobs) because they forgot that email is never totally private without encryption. Just as there are some things that you might not want to say on a cellular phone, there are some things that you might not want to write in an email.
CONVENIENT FEATURES
Most email systems allow you to create nicknames for people (or groups of people) to whom you frequently send email. In an office environment, it is also usually pretty easy to look up the email address of someone else in the office. If you are connected to the world wide web, it is even becoming increasingly prevalent to be able to look up the email address of other people much like looking up phone numbers in the phone book. (Of course, they must have an email account for this to work.)
Most people who have www pages list their email address on their page, and usually have it set up so that you can click on their name and send an email. Most www browsers (such as Netscape Navigator) have a built in email interface to facilitate this.
Sophisticated users also have some advanced email features available to them. Some software allows the user to set up "filters" that will perform specific tasks, such as filing all email from your boss in a certain directory/folder on your computer. Many will allow you to set up automated reply messages to be sent out while you are on vacation. Within an office environment, you often have the ability to tell if someone has read email you have sent them or not. You can even set up filters to remove annoying messages from people you don't know (or people you do know). The ease of using email will only improve in the future. It is possible today to buy hand held devices which allow you to read and send email over a wireless radio link. These devices will continue to get cheaper and more powerful. As more and more people have computers in their homes, we will continue to see growth in email as a method for people to communicate. It may never replace the simplicity of a phone call or the romance of a hand written love letter, but it will be a mainstay in the communications tool kit, both in business and personal life.
Marty Levyhas a Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Iowa. He is employed as a product manager at Motorola in Austin, Texas.
TEXAS PARALEGAL JOURNAL
Winter 1996
©1996 Legal Assistants Division, State Bar of Texas