E-mail, a Blessing and an Annoyance For the blessing: E-mail is a conversation that does not require an immediate response (like a telephone). If someone calls you on the telephone, you pick it up (unless you have an answering machine, voice mail or you are just plain rude) and the conversation begins. This is an interactive conversation. With e-mail, you send a message and then wait for a response. The response may come in five minutes or it may come in five days. Either way, it’s not an interactive conversation. If a hundred people send you e-mails in one day, so what? You don’t have to talk with all one hundred. Just think of all the hellos, goodbyes and other unnecessary chit-chat you can avoid. With e-mail, you only deal with their messages (which usually omit hellos, goodbyes and such) and you deal with them on your own time. That’s the blessing. Now for the annoyance: Too many e-mail users assume that the minute someone receives an e-mail, the person will read it. Bad assumption. If you schedule a meeting for an hour from now and send an e-mail to each participant, the chance that all the participants will read that message within the hour will be pretty small. On the other hand, if you schedule the meeting for the next day, the chance that they will read the message will be pretty high. Remember, e-mail is not designed for immediate response (that’s why you have a telephone), it’s designed for convenience. Some (not all) e-mail systems have features that try to combat this problem. These features (usually called “notification”) will notify you when a person has received your e-mail and may also tell you when the person has read it (really all it can do is assure you that the person has looked at the first screen of the message—it has no way to know if the person has read the message word for word). Referring back to the example in the previous paragraph, you could check to see who has checked their e-mail before the meeting and then telephone those who have not read it. Attachment: Smilies Since there are no facial and voice cues to help e-mail, users have come up with something called “smilies”. They are simple series of symbols that are pieced together in the e-mail text to help express the writer’s feelings. The most common example is :-) (a smiling face). Here are some more examples.