E-Business - E-mail

E-mail Advantages For a Business

E-mail has swept the communications and information world during the past decade, providing instantaneous global information and data exchange. People who send e-mail via the Internet--the amorphous network that links computers worldwide via telephone lines--can correspond with individuals 10,000 miles away as easily, quickly, and inexpensively as they can with neighbors next door. They can communicate with one or many people at the same time. And they can distribute information to any other user as soon as they create it.

E-mail services can be used both for "telephone-type" messages and for other, usually longer, messages or documents that might otherwise be sent using facsimile or hard-copy postal services, both public and private. Compared with the telephone system, one primary advantage of an e-mail service is that it eliminates "telephone tag." It also provides a content record of the interactions that can be retrieved, printed, studied, selectively forwarded, and in general reused. Other advantages are that it permits (but certainly does not require) more deliberative and reflective, but still interactive, conversational dialogs, as well as one-to-many and many-to-many conversations. These features have led to many new social, commercial, and political groupings of people: the "virtual communities" mentioned above, using e-mail as the linkage. It provides a common context among a set of participants.

Compared with postal services, an e-mail service offers much faster mail delivery--usually minutes between any two locations in the United States (although currently, delays up to a day occur with some Internet access providers), compared with one to several days for postal systems. E-mail systems also afford much more flexibility (both locational and temporal) in that delivery. In the current postal system, a person's mail is delivered to one or two (or at most a few) fixed addresses (e.g., home or office). In most e-mail systems, a person with the proper (portable) terminal equipment can log in to his or her "mailbox" from any location that has electronic access to the system. Today, this means that people can pick up their e-mail from their office, their home, their hotel rooms, another office (perhaps in another city) they are visiting, or any site with a phone jack. In the future, as terminal equipment gets smaller and cellular telephones become more ubiquitous, one will be able to pick up or send e-mail while traveling in a car and flying in an airplane. This results in more geographic independence (where one gets mail) and temporal flexibility (when one gets mail).

These advantages are available in any e-mail system. The additional advantage of a universal e-mail system is that since everyone belongs to the system, a user can send e-mail to anyone, not just a limited group, and receive e-mail from anyone. This makes the special advantages of e-mail available for all of one's correspondence, not just a subset. If the costs of such a service permit attractive pricing, it could take over a significant portion of the business of current postal services especially when next-generation e-mail systems allow the transmission and viewing of multimedia messages containing high-resolution color pictures, "movie clips" of image sequences, and sound, which could, among other things, support a variety of "electronic commerce.

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