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It seems that traditional pen and paper is slowly being outdone by e-mail. People seem to like e-mail for its speed, price, and maybe even reliability. A good example of its superb quality is that in the postal service, a letter can be lost, chucked away or some other dilemma may occur. In some cases your birthday card doesn't arrive or was not sent successfully. The postal office usually claims solid performance, but it does depend on the country you live in! With e-mail, we think, 99% of the time the e-mail should bounce to you with lightening speed. That does not mean that e-mail is the best way of communicating, however. Errors happen whether human or electronic.
During 1997, AOL and Microsoft Network - just to name the big players - had severe mail outages resulting in delays, and in some cases, loss of e-mail. Many corporate mail servers have had growing pains, experiencing hold-ups and the odd deletion, especially over weekends. But on the whole you can be reasonably confident that your e-mail will arrive quickly and safely. If you don't get a reply in a few days you can always send the message again; at worst it will act as a reminder. (of course you DO need to save them in the sent folder or a copy some where that is "easily" findable!
If your e-mail generally takes more than a few minutes arriving you should seriously consider switching service providers. One good reason for hooking onto the net e-mail system should suffice. Once you gather loads of contacts from work colleagues, friends, relatives even people from the other side of the globe. Don't be surprised if it becomes you preferred method of contact. Because you can easily copy (cc) your e-mail to everyone in your address book rather than repeating letters again and again. It is over 100 times faster. It can even reduce the time you spend on the phone at work.
E-mail is such an improvement over the postal service is already revolutionizing the way you communicate. You can send a message to anyone in the world - almost instantaneously - and you may have a reply in the morning, or 5 minutes later!
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All you need to do is key in the correct address, put in a subject (if you want) write a brief note and click send. No letter heads, no stamps, no visiting the post office. E-mail is delivered 24/7 every day of the year. LOL and moxtly it does arrive!
Replacing traditional methods of contact is not e-mail's only strength; you can attach any computer file to the e-mail, so if your relative lives in Spain and can't come over to see your new baby, simple - send it as an attachment. Alhough attachments can sometimes contain viruses you can usually eliminate these with your virus scanner and most e-mail programs keep handy warnings for you of these too. Unfortunately, many people REFUSE to download any attachments at all, especially if they do not know the sender. Therefore first contacts and explanations can be useful and are recommended to verify addresses.
When you hook up to the Internet you automatically get your own e-mail. Of course you DO have to set it up! If you want your own on-the-net personal one, MSN and almost ever big site offers such services, In my opinion, forget what you've heard about future net or yahoo. Hotmail and MSN are the best. The reason being is that MSN concentrates more on the basics rather than clever stuff so MSN has the advantage over its other mail service cousins. Regardless look around and find an e-mail system that works for you!
Also if you want to share a message with someone, it's possible to forward a message. In fact it's possible if people wanted to, to forward the message to everyone in the world, or at least everyone in your addressbook. It is proper and correct to ask permission before sharing "personal e-mails" with other people.
Some mobile phones now have e-mail built in to their wap feature. So e-mail is possible anywhere, any place, any time.
Cybertown has a good understanding of e-mail, as it offers its own service which is very good. Inboxing people in Cybertown is a method of e-mail too. But probably not as advanced. It is great for communicating and even learning some basic html.
Not long ago, e-mail was strictly a "text only" affair. Today sending whole web pages is possible and adding anything from pictures of my new born baby to a picture of the new house. It's also possible to send movies and music opening a New World to e-mailers.
Although there is a lot of fuss about security and hacking, e-mail may be safer than phone, fax and postal service. In reality it's easier to break into your home than break into e-mail accounts, unless you give out your password. And privacy on the internet is very questionable.
In years to come, a few experts think the postal service will be abolished altogether, and all greetings will be sent via e-mail. We might keep in mind experts have predicted the elimination of paper files, reduced paper use etc. These predictions, of course have proven incorrect. So, whether this will happen I don't know. But soon, or in the not-too-distant future a new communication service will be unveiled. Speak mail where you speak into a microphone and send it to people all over the world. Of course with attachments, it IS already here! So if you want to say to your Mum "help me someone is chasing me" it will be possible. In 100 years time, who knows? All we can say is that with technology advancing all the time, communication will definitely grow with it.
Do you agree? Disagree? Want to comment? Send commennts to Managing Editor, CVN