Collegiate Times

Where would you be without your BlackBerry? In today?s connected world, it is easy to forget that many cars on the road have been around longer than e-mail. According to Wikipedia, the first e-mail was sent sometime in the late 1960?s, with the first network e-mail following soon thereafter. The US military saw promise in this technology, as they were and continue to be key financial backers of Internet technology. According to Columbia University?s Michael Hauben, ?the global Internet?s progenitor was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) of the U.S. Department of Defense.? E-mail became the ?killer app? and buzz of ARPANET.

Today, the state of the art is Internet2. Virginia Tech has been a participant on the Abilene network of Internet2 since 1999. According to its sponsors, the Abilene Network is a high-performance backbone network that enables the development of advanced Internet applications and the deployment of leading-edge network services to Internet2 universities and research labs across the country. It has become the most advanced native IP backbone network available to universities participating in Internet2. Sounds pretty good, but can I download my MP3s with it?

In researching this article, I did some informal polling about e-mail volume. It seems that there are people who can handle apparently any amount of e-mail, while there are some people who get overwhelmed by a few e-mails per day. E-mail is becoming a real problem for some. You get up before the sun and check your e-mail. You check your e-mail on your handheld during lunch. You put in an hour or two on e-mail after you finally get home from work. If you do all that, e-mail may be a problem for you. I can remember when the personal computer was billed as the ?time-saving device of the future.? An upper-level executive putting in 18-hour days might say there was a bug in that idea. Research conducted for Hewlett-Packard by scientists from the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London warns of ?abuse of always-on technology? where ?workers are literally addicted to checking e-mail and text messages during meetings, in the evening and at weekends.?

E-mail filtering seems to be of utmost importance to those who are on the upper end of e-mail volume. I use a Qualcomm product called Eudora on my machine, which has an easy filter option. I simply right click on the e-mail in the inbox and pick the create filter option. The filter allows you to separate e-mails by sender or subject etc. If you e-mail me more than a few times a day you will have a mailbox on my desktop with your name on it. There are a great many good software products out there and I strongly suggest to my readers to seek them out.

Spam, Spam and more Spam! According to Wikipedia, sending spam violates the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) of almost all Internet Service Providers, and can lead to the termination of the sender?s account. Many jurisdictions, such as the United States of America, which regulates via the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, regard spamming as a crime or as an actionable tort. As the recipient directly bears the cost of delivery, storage and processing, one could regard spam as the electronic equivalent of ?postage-due? junk mail. However, the Direct Marketing Association will point to the existence of ?legitimate? e-mail marketing. Most commentators classify e-mail-based marketing campaigns where the recipient has ?opted in? to receive the marketer?s message as ?legitimate.? Generally, it is a good idea not to click on anything in unexpected incoming e-mails.

One fraud that is widespread via e-mail looks like an e-mail from eBay or various credit cards asking you to click a link to ?correct? your contact info. One click and you are in a back room of some internet caf? in the Cayman Islands giving a guy with no last name your credit card number ? not good! Remember that those businesses you deal with routinely know your name and would never address you as ?Dear Customer.?

E-mail, unlike regular mail, which is costly to print and send, allows you the ability to network with your fellow humans. Don?t be afraid of this medium ? embrace it! Sometimes I feel like I have a conduit running through my house of pure energy. There are e-mail groups and forums and lists of every imaginable type out there. For example, go to Yahoo.com and look up listservs. Whether it be Hang-Gliding or ancient basket design you will find like-minded people to converse with. Create a filter for all the mail from the listserv by subject and you can scan your new messages on that list in seconds rather than fishing around your store-all inbox yet again. For the record I receive about 300 e-mails per day average and can spend as little as 15 minutes per day and know what I have received or spend a lifetime of study to fully absorb their meaning.