E-MAIL (Fall 97 issue)

The use of e-mail is growing without bounds. This article discusses some of the benefits, which are available for users.

E-mail is free. While this is not a significant benefit to those in business, it does save expenses.

E-mail can be sent to a person who is not available to answer his telephone. Many users will check back to their office from a laptop while on the road and download received e-mail messages. The down side is that you don't know if the recipient really received it unless you click the "return receipt" button (on Eudora). This will tell you that someone downloaded the message, but if the recipient is on the road and his secretary is the one who downloaded the message, it may or may not get to him in a timely fashion. But then, you have the same problem with faxes and voice mail.

A major benefit is that you can send or "attach" other documents or files to your message. For instance, MAC is going to start placing curriculum vitaes (CVs) of our Associates on its homepage. If they are received by MAC in printed form through the US mail, the CVs must be scanned into a computer, the scanned image must be run through optical character recognition software to convert it from an image to a text document, the text converted to HTLM format. Finally it is placed in the directory where the search engine of the homepage can find it. How much easier it will be to have a CV attached to an e-mail message. It is already in electronic text format and the MAC needs only convert it to HTML (the format used by the web) and load it into the correct directory for it to be immediately available.

Another benefit of forwarding any document as an attachment to e-mail messages is that where several people may want to have input to the drafting of a single document, it can be sent back and forth with each person modifying it without ever having to convert it to or from paper. In other words, it doesn’t have to be typed but once.

We are moving towards a paperless society. I’m sure the trees will appreciate it!

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