What's is Email ?

Electronic mail has become the unexciting and mundane electronic communication medium that we love to hate. It wasn't always that way. The hate is a fairly recent emotion.

Email has been with us in one form or another since the earliest days of computer networks and bulletin board services. From inauspicious beginnings, it became one of the three "killer apps," along with Telnet and FTP, that gave the Internet its momentum. Since the early 1980's, the popularity of the Internet and that of email have been wed.

Since the 1970's, email has evolved into the communication tool of choice for information technology academics and professionals. By the 1990's, the popularity of email throughout the rest of academia and high-tech industry, established it as a communications standard within those areas as well. It appears likely that the current wave of online service providers will soon extend this standard to the rest of the network-connectable world.

As email has evolved, we have come to surprisingly sparse consensus regarding the best and worst uses of this technology, and whether the technology itself can overcome its weaknesses over time. In the paragraphs below, I'll try to summarize what seem to me to be some interesting aspects of email, particularly as it relates to the phenomenon of information overload and some thorny privacy issues.