Email

This page looks at technical primers, regulatory issues (in particular spam, copyright and privacy), hoaxes and developments such as ENUM and Rich Media.

     primers

Apart from Palme's Electronic Mail (Norwood: Artech House 95), which offers a useful although somewhat dated account of business and regulatory questions, social impacts and technical such as X.400, several short primers may be of assistance.

These include The E-mail Frontier: Emerging Markets and Evolving Technologies (Reading: Addison-Wesley 94) by Daniel Blum & David Litwack and Marshall Rose's Internet Messaging: From the Desktop to the Enterprise (Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall 93) which replaces his The Internet Message: Closing the Book with Electronic Mail (Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall 93).

For the X.400 standard consult Essential Email Standards: RFCs and Protocols Made Practical (New York: Wiley 99) by Pete Loshin & Paul Hoffman, Sara Radicati's Electronic Mail: An introduction to the X.400 Message Handling Standards (New York, McGraw-Hill 92) or Cemil Betanov's Introduction to X.400 (Boston: Artech 92).

     interaction

For interaction studies consult Connections (Cambridge: MIT Press 92) by Lee Sproull & Sara Kiesler, Intermedia: Interpersonal Communication in a Media World (New York: Oxford Uni Press 86) edited by Gary Gumpert & Robert Cathcart or Psychology & the Internet: Intrapersonal, Interpersonal & Transpersonal Implications (San Diego: Academic Press 99) edited by Jayne Gackenbach.

They're more impressive than The Psychology of the Internet (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 99) by Patricia Wallace and the often silly Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (London:, Weidenfeld & Nicolson 96) by structuralist Sherry Turkle. We've pointed to other studies throughout our Digital guide; they include Jacques Attali's gnomic Millennium: Winners & Losers In The Coming Order (New York: Times 92) and Digital Nomad (New York: Wiley 97) by Tsugio Makimoto & David Manners.

     impact

There is no major study of the economic or cultural impact of email. We point to individual commercial and academic studies in our weekly newsletter Analysphere, such as reports by the Pew project about adoption of email by different US groups.

The Network Nation (Cambridge: MIT Press 93) by Roxanne Hiltz Starr & Murray Turoff and No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 86) by Joshua Meyrowitz are dated but insightful.

Naomi Baron's Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved & Where It's Heading (London: Routledge 00) extends her 1998 Letters by phone or speech by other means: The linguistics of email and paper on Writing in the Age of Email: The Impact of Ideology versus Technology. David Crystal's Language & The Internet (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 01) explores the same territory but is excessively reverent; we preferred the wit and analysis in The Way We Talk Now (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 01) by Geoffrey Nunberg.

     Privacy

Our Privacy guide offers a detailed discussion of privacy issues and regulation. In particular it notes differing government and industry responses to ongoing reports demonstrating that many businesses systematically monitor email created/received by their employees, with the rationale that computers and connections are corporate resources rather than private property.

The Security guide looks at privacy enhancing tools such as encryption.

     Copyright

Our Intellectual Property guide includes a page discussing the copyright status of email, something that's been in the news following incautious ministerial statements after passage of Australia's 'Digital Agenda' copyright reforms.

In principle, an email message addressed to a single recipient has the same copyright protection as a handwritten letter, i.e. it is protected by copyright (the author owns copyright in the text, the recipient merely owns the physical embodiment - paper and ink - of that intellectual property).

     Defamation and hate speech

Most jurisdictions similarly make few distinctions between defamation and that involving ink on paper. We've pointed to particular studies in exploring free speech and other issues in our Censorship, Politics and Governance guides.

Examples include Russell Weaver's cogent paper Defamation Law in Turmoil: The Challenges Presented by the Internet, the interesting but somewhat utopian analysis by Brian Martin, Lilian Edwards 1997 paper Defamation & the Internet: Name Calling in Cyberspace, Marty Sutcliffe's paper Defamation on the Internet: Searching for Community, Identity & Statutory Solutions and The Law of Defamation & the Internet (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 01) by Matthew Collins.

Our Politics guide includes a page dealing with online vilification, hatespeech and hate sites. A more detailed profile about online defamation principles, cases and academic literature is here.

     Spam

Unsolicited commercial email (spam) has emerged as a major consumer, business and regulatory issue. AOL for example estimates that spam accounts for 30% of email to its subscribers, with between 5 and 8.5 billion messages pa. A January 2001 study from the European Commission estimates that internet users pay 10 billion euro in connection costs just to receive spam.

We've explored the significance of spam in our Security guide. It points to consumer and industry organisations such as the US Coalition Against Unsolicited Bulk Email (CAUCE) and Australian Coalition Against Unsolicited Bulk Email (CAUBE). It also discusses documents such as the 1999 CommerceNet paper (PDF) on Unsolicited Commercial E-mail: Legislative Solutions and David Sorkin's 1997 paper on Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail & the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991.

     hoaxes

The US government Computer Incident Advisory Center (CIAC) has an excellent set of resources about email hoaxes and chain letters. There's an analysis of the latter at Donald Watrous' Chain Letter page.

     the email tax?

Our Taxation guide features a detailed discussion of proposals for a Tobin-style 'byte' tax, typically a fraction of a cent on every email sent/received. Those proposals have been reflected in recurrent hoaxes; one example is discussed here.

     ENUM

The Network guide on this site discusses email-related addressing initiatives such as ENUM (a standard adopted by the Internet Engineering Task Force) and the proprietary WebNum standard. Both should, in principle, permit electronic mailboxes that allow a single contact identifier for individuals - covering email, mobile phone, home phone, business phone and fax, and associated services.

For a brief introduction see Anthony Rutkowski's September 2000 column ENUM: the Internet's Glueball Infrastructure and the ITU's ENUM page.

     Rich Media and usability

Although statistics are problematical, it is clear that there's increasing commercial interest in 'rich media': using HTML for the display of text within email messages or incorporation of still graphics and animations within messages.

Overall, much of the enthusiasm seems unfounded, since the firewalls used by many organisations exclude such messages and different browsers display the information in a substantially different way.

The Usability of eMail Subject Lines, a paper by John Rhodes, Daniel Sloat, James Griffith & Gregory Benoit explores one of the neglected areas of the usability and marketing literature, surprising given the volume of email dealt with most days and its significance.

Its authors highlight comments by Jakob Nielsen in his September 1998 Alertbox article on Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles & Subject Lines, noting however that there is little empirical information about responses to email and there's disagreement about aids such as Uni of Wisconsin guide. Among other comments it concludes that users are more likely to open a message that begins with "RE:". They are also very likely to delete one beginning with "FW:".




   next page  (SMS)