Getting the Message

The advantages and disadvantages of electronic mail.

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Electronic mail is an idea whose time has come -- sort of

Once in the not-too-distant past, when computers were first coming into their own, people dreamed of the paperless office: a wonderful, tidy room lit by the cheery glow of a computer screen. Memos and mail would come and go electronically -- sent, received, sorted, and filed by computers -- and we would be free of the blizzard of paper that has plagued us since the industrial revolution.

Today, electronic mail conveys less than 2% of all business correspondence, but it is developing rapidly, the beneficiary of advances in computer communications and artificial intelligence. Whether your company is ready for electronic mail depends on how your computers are set up and on how your employees currently use them.

In electronic mail, or e-mail, messages are composed, sent, and usually read on computer screens. The messages may travel within an organization (internal e-mail, analogous to interoffice mail) or over a network available to anyone who pays a subscription fee (public e-mail, analogous to a carrier such as the U.S. Postal Service or United Parcel Service). Messages travel through cables.

In an internal system, the cables link several computers, each with a built-in or accessory interface circuit, to form a local area network (LAN). Several LANs -- in the same neighborhood or across a continent -- can be connected together by hardware-plus-software bridges. For storing and forwarding messages, some internal e-mail systems rely on a host computer, often a large one such as a Digital Equipment VAX or an IBM mainframe.

Public e-mail connections are made through the telephone system. The computers connect to the phone system by means of modems, devices that convert computer information into audio tones able to travel over telephone wires. Several dozen public e-mail systems are available; the largest include Telemail, EasyLink, CompuServe, and MCI Mail. Sending a one-page public e-mail message typically costs 50¢ or less; a 10-page message might run around $2.

No electronic mail system can completely replace paper mail. After all, you can't send color brochures or product samples electronically. And some e-mail messages wind up being printed by the recipient; long documents, for example, are too tedious to read off a computer screen. But sending documents electronically is faster and less expensive than overnight express couriers, and for ordinary office memos and letters, e-mail really can reduce paper consumption. E-mail messages can successfully take the place of many routine phone calls, and because people can receive complete e-mail messages whenever they are working at their computers, a lot of telephone tag disappears. Computer files can also be sent via most e-mail systems, so you can transmit a spreadsheet or a business plan to an associate, who can then load it into his or her own computer for modification. E-mail is particularly effective for communications between home and branch offices because messages do not need to make a mail-pouch departure time. Someone in a branch office can use a computer and modem to call up a computer that is on the home office's network and exchange messages with everyone on that network.

These advantages may come at a significant cost, however. If your computers are not now linked in a LAN, you will have to install one. You should first consider the cost of cabling all the computers together, a difficult and expensive process in some older buildings but usually fairly easy in newer ones. You also need to figure in the cost of the hardware and software to support the network itself: from about $250 to $800 per computer, depending on the type of network. If your company has multiple LANs -- typically in separate departments or buildings -- they can be linked together for e-mail if they are of the same type. E-mail is not always possible between LANs of different types; right now it is even difficult to send e-mail between networks of IBM PCs and of Macintoshes, although suppliers of internal e-mail software promise a solution by 1989. After the computer network is set up, the cost of sending an internal e-mail message is very low: a fraction of a cent per message.

Once installed, will an e-mail system be used? If your people are already working with computers a great deal, they will undoubtedly embrace e-mail with enthusiasm. If they use computers only sporadically, a concerted management effort will be required to get everyone started: managers must not only use e-mail themselves but should also make a point of distributing certain important information only electronically. Special provision will have to be made for employees who do not have computers on their desks, either by setting up a central computer they can check periodically for messages or by printing their messages on paper. E-mail is like photocopying: once people get used to it, they won't be able to work without it. But a critical mass of e-mail messages is needed to drive the system. If your company cannot reach this critical mass now, you're better off waiting until it can, rather than installing an expensive system and watching it languish from disuse.

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