the Bad

• Email may lead to communication slavery. My law of digital sinkholes holds that once the foot is in, the ankle, and leg soon follow in order. In this case, a conscientious, established emailer has nowhere to hide once the email address gets out - and email always (almost) gets through. One normally can't ignore email, as one ignores the telephone, without the potential of repercussion - even if its unsolicited and from a stranger. Few among us can afford the luxury of disconnecting ourselves. (Donald Knuth is a notable exception in this regard - see, www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html.) [Berghel: Email: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly]

• The convenience of email encourages abuse at the inter- personal level. Since email may easily circumvent established organizational information routes, and since there is no cost to the sender associated with the transmission, the temptation to harangue a stranger is sometimes too much to ignore. [Berghel: Email: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly]

• Email extensions encourage irresponsible mass-mailings. Alias and distribution lists make email bombing and spamming inevitable. Like telephony, the advantages of email are most evident as point-to-point communication; and like hardcopy junk mail, the disadvantages of email are most evident when it comes to "broadcasting" because if its inherently intrusive nature. [Berghel: Email: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly]

• There are still few effective tools for adjusting email in- flow to what Peter Denning calls "personal bandwidth." It is interesting to note that not a great deal has changed since Peter Denning made this point in 1982! [Berghel: Email: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly]

• (Bad or maybe ugly) My problem is with junk email. The truck outside today picking up my used paper mail for recycling reminds me that there is no way to recycle junk email. Today I gave up the opportunity to get rich by sending $5 to the name at the bottom of an emailed list! At least when the postperson delivers that msg on paper, I can extract something useful from it.

• I always wondered if email users would learn to become good typists, or they would learn to accept email typos as a way of life. With spell checkers, the problem is diminished, but watch for mispelling someone's name wrong! Voice messaging has had its own crosses to bear, like not having a subject line for message filtering and management, not being able to easily scan a message, and not being able to cut and paste portions of a message for forwarding. With current consolidation of multimedia messaging at the desktop, perhaps some of these handicaps will be alleviated for voice messages. However, it will be intersting to see what happens to "messaging ettiquette" when the choice of medium is tryul optional for both sending and receiving messages. The same concerns apply to real-time telephony communications, e.g., switching from messaging mode to a live call connection ("live reply").
  Art Rosenberg
  artr@ix.netcom.com

• Enjoyde the CACM piece on the [dys]functional side of email. A small comment (and a real hobbyhorse of mine): To Deming's list should be added the option of "timestamping", something I have been looking for for ages both in email, voicemail, and for that matter all communication where electronic information is stored in a controllable mailbox. The idea is simple: It should be possible to add a date/time to any message, with the meaning that "if this has not been read before this time, this message should be automatically deleted". The use for this is simple: All those messages about "the server is going down", "it is up again", "a car is parked with lights on", "34th reminder of meeting in two hours" etc. creates clutter: It is in the sender's interest to have them removed after their due date is passed. I haven't seen support for this in any email/voicemail/answering machine system--how about it? Espen Andersen
  Espen Andersen
  http://www1.usa1.com/~self/
  self@espen.com

• "...we should start paying for e-mail. You know, we have e-mail, we should have e-postage. Postage is a time-honored way of paying for mail. E-postage would create a revenue stream for the people who provide mail... [a second reason] for e-mail postage, by the way, is to discourage Spam or junk mail....So with e-postage you would have the opportunity to subscribe to e-mail services where you could pay per message according to how big the message is, or how fast it goes through, or for whether you get a return receipt, or for how far it is going." [Bob Metcalf, interview, IEEE Internet Computing; April, 1997]

• "...we should start paying for e-mail. You know, we have e-mail, we should have e-postage. Postage is a time-honored way of paying for mail. E-postage would create a revenue stream for the people who provide mail... [a second reason] for e-mail postage, by the way, is to discourage Spam or junk mail....So with e-postage you would have the opportunity to subscribe to e-mail services where you could pay per message according to how big the message is, or how fast it goes through, or for whether you get a return receipt, or for how far it is going." [Bob Metcalf, interview, IEEE Internet Computing; April, 1997]

• In response to Espen Andersen's comment about Email that expires. there are several email systems that incorporate a date expiry feature (e.g., Microsoft Outlook). However, to be useful, a human has to set the expiration date before emailing. Also, there is of course no compatibility of formats for these types of features across email systems, so the expiry feature does no good to me for people that mail me with a different package. The challenge to me appears to be whether or not a system can be created that can parse such features on its own, or if some type of standards can be created so that all email systems can interoperate based on additional pieces of information.
  Kenrick Mock
  http://phobos.cs.ucdavis.edu:8001/~mock
  kenrick@cs.pdx.edu

• "Spamming will ultimately be dealt with through a combination of legislation, ISP administrative changes, and individual efforts. We must find ways to protect ourselves without undermining free enterprise, freedom of speech rights, and common sense, and without encumbering our own normal use - a difficult task indeed. In the meantime, perhaps the best you can do for yourself is to never, *ever*, respond positively to a spammer's ad." [source: Peter Neumann and Lauren Weinstein, Inside Risks, CACM 40:6, June 1997]