So where's the dancing, singing e-mail?

By PETER SINCLAIR

Today's e-mail has about as much pizzazz as last century's telegram.

Bill Gates - and indeed, all his rivals in the e-mail application field - have put enormous time and money into building all-singing, all-dancing capabilities into their various mailers with HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the same code that floods the web with life and colour.

So why doesn't anyone use them?

Colours, formats, wallpapers, graphics, animated .gif files, every art and grace known to geekdom are at our fingertips, and what do you always get? - the usual bleak industrial landscape of black-and-white Arial 12pt. Dull, dull, dull ...

I sometimes wonder if anyone has ever actually burrowed down to Tools/Options/Mail Format in Microsoft Outlook and checked the HTML box, or bothered to click on the Insert menu to embed a graphic.

Despite futuristic resources available to anyone, in aesthetic terms we've fallen way behind a medieval monk illuminating a manuscript.

We had better get our collective act together, because e-mail technology isn't slowing.

In February, 3Com announced a new digital webcam designed to realise the potential of "see-mail."

Now 3Com has been joined by British Telecom, no less, which promises to "bring e-mail to life before your very eyes" using avatar technology developed for the Millennium Dome.

An "avatar" (Sanskrit for "the incarnation of a god on earth") is an image you choose (or create) to inhabit in 3-D chatrooms. To use one, you need a VRML plug-in. A commercial example is newsbot Ananova.

When a new message hits your inbox, Avtalk Talking Email recognises the sender and automatically selects that person's 3D virtual image - an image that can be created at the BT site using the person's real photograph.

The e-mail is then spoken to you by the sender in person. I mean, how cool is that?

Now we know that e-mail never really goes away, messages which spontaneously ... well, evaporate ... have become a matter of some urgency.

The indiscreet will welcome both SafeMessage which sends encrypted messages you can stop the recipient copying, saving, forwarding or printing, and Disappearing E-mail, whose messages crumble into electronic dust after a preset time.

So if you think you're confused by plain vanilla e-mail, just wait until next year when this little lot hits your mailer ...

In the meantime, why not go to "Stationery" somewhere on your toolbar (depending which app you use) and choose a nice bit of default wallpaper? Well, it's a start ...

Links:

3Com

British Telecom

VRML plug-in

Ananova

SafeMessage

Disappearing E-mail