Most subscribers to public e-mail have relied on standard communications software, general-purpose programs that usually require some experience with computers and modems. When you use these programs to call up a public e-mail service, you have to cope with the service's user interface, which is designed for the lowest common denominator, a Teletype terminal designed a quarter of a century ago, rather than a modern microcomputer. You could learn to use this interface, but don't waste the time. Instead, get modern communications software, with a modern interface, designed to handle your interaction with the e-mail service. Desktop Express, for example, manages MCI Mail on a Macintosh, and Lotus Express does it on an IBM PC.
Which public system should you subscribe to? The biggest single problem in public e-mail is that the various services generally cannot talk to one another. Most are islands, like the many independent telephone companies operating at the turn of the century; subscribers to one phone company could not call subscribers to another company. A few public e-mail services do allow limited interchange: you can send messages to telex machines from most of them, and CompuServe and MCI Mail subscribers can send messages to one another. In making your choice, therefore, you should consider which system is used by the majority of the people with whom you need to communicate. Then be sure to let your correspondents know which service you are using; your e-mail address should be as integral a part of your letterhead and business cards as your company's phone number.
Part of the reason that few e-mail services communicate with one another is that electronic mail, unlike paper mail, has no universal addressing system. The address of your office is used by Federal Express, the postal service, and every other delivery service, but if you subscribe to three electronic mail services, you will have three completely different e-mail addresses. Making life even more difficult, most public e-mail systems do not publish a directory of their subscribers. If you subscribe to MCI Mail, you can ask for the address of another MCI Mail subscriber, but you cannot look up the address of a CompuServe subscriber. A new international standard for e-mail addresses and directories, called X.500, is under development, but its acceptance will take some time, and for it to be effective, all public e-mail services will have to follow it.
Because of these inconveniences, and because most people are not yet on any e-mail system, some electronic messages sent via public services reach their final destination by telex or facsimile. E-mail can also arrive as paper mail. The service transmits your message electronically to the recipient's city, prints it, and then delivers it by courier or first-class mail.
An obvious advantage of electronic mail over regular mail is speed. But although public systems can send a message in seconds, the recipient knows that a message is waiting only when he or she dials up the service. If the recipient calls only once a week, he or she might not get your message until seven days after you sent it. To alleviate this problem, you can tell the recipient by phone that you have sent some e-mail (or leave a message that you have left a message . . .). Many e-mail systems provide return receipts to let you know when your message was received.
* * *
Managing e-mail
Since all electronic mail requires a computer to send and receive messages, that same computer can sort and file these messages automatically. Electronic filing is easier and more flexible than maintaining a paper file, particularly since the same message can be filed under several categories at once. The most effective e-mail filing program is Lotus Agenda, which can sort messages by date, by sender, and by any names contained in the message. You can also identify any part of a message as important and retrieve it by those words, and you can create synonyms. Thus, you could equate the terms safety, safety officer Jane Smith, OSHA, and Jane Smith and retrieve all related messages with a single command. Agenda works so well on e-mail messages that its fans complain that they wish it could file their paper mail as well.
General indexing programs, such as ZyIndex, and text-retrieval programs, such as GOfer, can help you find particular e-mail messages because they can find any word or combination of words in any text. For instance, these programs allow you to retrieve all messages containing the word safety within 50 words of chemical.
Can a computer manage the purpose of your mail in addition to its contents? Coordinator is a package that not only enables you to send and receive e-mail, but also tries to impose a structure for the messages. For example, rather than scheduling a meeting for 2:00 p.m. Wednesday, Coordinator has you "declare a time commitment." Instead of a general thank-you at the end of an electronic meeting, Coordinator's manual recommends the command "declare this conversation complete" to "close off the possibility of performing any further cogent moves in the conversation' -- the e-mail equivalent of slamming down the phone. These rigid concepts might work in highly structured organizations with sharply defined lines of authority, but others will find the language a little strange. A new version of Coordinator is supposed to soften the iron fist.
Ironically, the fastest-growing form of electronic mail, facsimile, is adding to the paper blizzard. An upcoming column will show why.
* * *
Cary Lu is technology editor of Inc.
RESOURCES
Where to get more information
If you want to find out more about e-mail software, try the following sources:
cc:Mail LAN Package 3.0: cc:Mail Inc., 480 California Ave., Palo Alto CA 94306; (415) 321-0430. $695.
The Coordinator: Action Technologies Inc., 2200 Powell St., 11th Floor, Emeryville CA 94608; (415) 654-4444. $995.
Desktop Express: Dow Jones Software, PO Box 300, Princeton NJ 08543; (609) 520-4641. $149.
GOfer: Microlytics Inc., 1 Tobey Village Office Park, Pittsford NY 14534; (716) 248-9150. $79.95.
InBox: Symantec Corp., 10201 Torre Ave., Cupertino CA
95014; (408) 253-9600. $195 to $599.
Lotus Express for MCI Mail, Lotus Agenda: Lotus Development Corp., 55 Cambridge Pkwy., Cambridge MA 02142; (617) 577-8500. $100 and $395.
QuickMail: CE Software, 1854 Fuller Rd., West Des Moines IA 50265; (515) 224-1195. $300.
3+Mail: 3Com Corp., 3165 Kifer Rd., Santa Clara CA 95052; (408) 562-6400. $595.
ZyIndex: ZyLab Corp., 3105-T North Wilke Rd., Arlington Heights IL 60004; (312) 632-1100. $95 to $695. n
