Mail, News and More

The Nature and Use of Email

• Email can be both interactive and asynchronous
• Email tends to be a hybrid of spoken and written language
• Email can be both transient and permanent

“Email is clearly a language form in flux.”  — [Baron (2000, p.252)]

In terms of the history of communication, email is a relatively new medium; to some extent, we
are still discovering how best to use it in our day-to-day lives. Email has several features that
distinguish it from other forms of communication, and which often create problems for new users.
Firstly, email is designed to be asynchronous, and as such is like “snailmail” (ordinary paperbased
post) or voicemail; there's not meant to be an immediate reply or conversation involved,
and the mail sits in the inbox until collected by the recipient. However, it's also often fast enough
to be used synchronously, so that two correspondents can, if online at the same time, hold
something like a conversation using email.
Secondly, and perhaps because of this first point, it is emerging in language terms as a hybrid
of speech and writing. Emails tend to be more casual than letters or memos, but more formal
than a phone or face-to-face conversation. This often causes problems for new users who have
difficulty in finding the correct “register” for their emails, and often use too formal or too casual
language in inappropriate situations.
The relatively relaxed nature of email communication combined with the ease with which
messages can be distributed and archived also leads to problems. In a landmark libel action (WPA
vs. Norwich Union Healthcare, 2000 [http://www.cyberlawatsidley.com/cyberlaw/features/
misuse.asp]) against a subsidiary of the Norwich Union Insurance Company by one of its
competitors, court orders were obtained to ensure that emails relevant to the case were preserved,
and these emails were subsequently used as evidence in the trial. What may have just been casual
office gossip around the photocopier just a few years ago becomes admissible evidence because
it is written rather than spoken.
A similar situation occurred in the mid-eighties with the internal (non-Internet) email system
installed in the US White House offices. Again, the backup tapes of email correspondence were seized, and were used in the inquiry against Oliver North and others surrounding the Iran-Contra
scandal. This highlighted the fact that, with digital data, merely deleting the file or message is
not enough; it's all too often recovereable from somewhere.
There's much more material on the characteristics and effects of email in Stefik (1997, esp.
pp.111-123).

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How Email Works

• More protocols:
• SMTP - distributes mail between mailservers
• POP - used to download mail to your computer
• IMAP - used to access your mail remotely on a server

Email provides a fast, efficient delivery system for text-based messages. As with all applications
on the Internet, it uses certain protocols to achieve this, as illustrated in Figure 3.1, “How email
works”:
• SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is used to distribute mail between servers, and by the
mail client to send the message initially;
• POP (Post Office Protocol) is used by the mail client to download messages and headers to a
local computer from the mail server. POP is useful if you want to read your mail offline (ie not
connected to your mailserver), as it downloads and stores your email on your own computer.
• IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) is used by clients to access mail directly on the mail
server. With IMAP, the mail usually stays stored on the recipient's server until it is deleted -
the mail client only views the mail, rather than downloading it.
On campus, it's possible to use either IMAP or POP; if you access your mail with the Mulberry,
Simeon or Execmail clients, then you're probably using IMAP, whereas if you use Eudora,
Outlook or Netscape to access mail, then you're most likely using POP.

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Using Email Attachments

• Basic email is text-only
• Other information needs to be encoded as text
• e.g. a MS-Word document is binary data
• needs to be converted to a text form
• Common formats: UUEncode, BinHex, MIME

Email was designed to be a text-only medium, and various tricks need to be used in order to send
any other type of data. You've probably already come across attachments, which allow you to
package a file or files within the email. The file is encoded so that it won't become corrupted
when passing through the email system, in one of several formats:
• UUEncoded — outdated and not very common now;
• BinHexed — common on Apple Macintosh computers
• MIME — Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension — the almost universal standard for the
Internet.
If you have a choice of formats to encode your attachment, MIME is almost always the best
choice. If someone sends you an attachment in a format that your mail client can't support,
then there are free tools available from most shareware/freeware websites (e.g. TuCows [http://
www.tucows.com/downloads/Windows/IS-IT/FileManagement/]) that can decode them for you

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