World suddenly smaller with e-mail

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

E-mail - daily curse, or saviour of the art of letter writing in an increasingly non-reading world? Probably a bit of both.

Most would agree that electronic mail is faster and more convenient than sending a letter. But there are pitfalls for novices and old hands alike.

Take Myrtle (not her real name), an Auckland-based Government administrative assistant, who learned how unforgiving some e-mail programs can be as she grappled with her department's internal messaging system.

"Getting the damned programs to work properly at all was a problem at first," she remembers.

"Then one day I was sent some off-colour humour through the internal e-mail. But the jokes were very funny and so, thinking I would share them with my partner, I tried to print them off. Little did I know, somehow I had unwittingly sent the jokes to the whole department, including the senior management.

"I only found out about it days later when the colleague who had originally sent the jokes to me was told off by the technical support services people."

In contrast, Tarryn Nicholson, a final-year student at Auckland University of Technology, discovered e-mail at the beginning of the year - when a few of her university friends headed off for London and California. So far, her initiation into the world of electronic communication has been problem-free.

"It was just much easier to keep in contact with them using e-mails rather than letters. I was quite surprised how quickly you can exchange information and get replies."

Following the advice of friends, Ms Nicholson set up free web-based e-mail accounts with Hotmail (www.hotmail.com) and Yahoo (www.yahoo.com).

Unlike the usual "client-based" accounts provided with most internet connections, these web-based services may be set up and accessed from any computer with an internet browser.

Not only do web mail services avoid the need for programs such as Microsoft Outlook or Netscape Mail, which new users often find perplexing, they may be as easily accessed from work or an internet café as from home.

The bigger internet providers, including Xtra and ihug, have woken up to the advantages of web mail and now offer their own web gateways - as do the free providers such as zfree, freenet and i4free. But you must be a subscriber before you can use them.

Ms Nicholson now receives one or two e-mails a day, ranging in length from brief notes to three-page tomes.

"At the beginning a friend in the States would e-mail every day, so it kind of developed into a habit."

Ms Nicholson says her replies also vary in length, but she tends to be much more informal in an e-mail than she would be in a letter.

E-mail has overcome the problems of different time zones and the expense of international phone calls, but she is increasingly using it to contact friends locally.

"Even in Auckland it's easier to e-mail them than to track them down on the phone," Ms Nicholson says.

It has also helped in her university studies. For one assignment she required some information from the headquarters of The Body Shop in Wellington.

"I phoned the person I needed to contact and then gave my e-mail address and then he e-mailed me back with the answers. It's a lot cheaper than phoning every time I had a query."

Tom Meijer is an Ellerslie-based Hotmail user who modestly describes himself as "reasonably IT literate." But even though he has been using electronic mail for at least eight years he still suffers the odd glitch.

He is particularly liable to errors when taking addresses down over the phone.

"I often need to ring the person back and ask, 'Now, exactly which part of this 20-character stream of letters, dots, hyphens and underscores did I get wrong?'

"That's the most unfriendly element of e-mail - there's no opportunity to use wildcards or blanks, you have to get it exactly right the first time."

Mr Meijer says Hotmail is good at filtering out "spam" or unsolicited advertising.

"The only spam I get is stuff that I have asked for myself, but I am occasionally troubled by friends who e-mail me their joke of the day or sad story of the day. It's a problem - just how do you tell your buddies that you don't want to get this stuff?"

These circulars are often made more unwelcome when they include a long list of the other addresses the sender has added to the "cc" (carbon copy) address line. When you send a bulk e-mail, it is preferable to hide these addresses by sending it to your own address while putting your recipients in blind carbon copy by clicking "bcc."

Mr Meijer finds that the sheer volume of those e-mails he wants to receive is becoming a problem. He now gets an average of 30 a day, but does not regard this as a lot compared to others' mailbags.

"It tends to be a bit of a problem when I go on holiday. I was recently in Fiji for a week and, much to the disgust of my partner, I had to go and get online a couple of times just to clear my mailbox.

"It's a bit sad really, isn't it?"