Definition A method of electronically sending
and receiving messages that can be stored for
further review and forwarded to other people
over a computer network
The number of e-mail users increased dramatically in the
1990’s. E-mail also became the primar y means of commu-
nication for many businesses and spawned a multibillion-
dollar support industr y.
E-mail, short for “electronic mail,” was created in the
mid-1960’s as a way for users who were sharing time
on a mainframe computer to communicate even
though they were on different schedules. Later in
the 1960’s, the ability to send messages to users on
different computers was added. Ray Tomlinson initi-
ated the use of the “at” sign (@) to separate the name
of the destination computer from the user name. By
1976, 75 percent of all the traffic on the Advanced
Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the
precursor to the Internet, was e-mail.
The 1990’s saw a move away from e-mail being
used mainly by researchers and academics to home
use, which led to an explosion in the total number of
e-mail users. By the end of the decade, more than
eighty million people were sending literally trillions
of messages per year. Part of the reason for this in-
crease in home e-mail use was that the Internet be-
came more available to people because of the
growth of personal computers and the greater avail-
ability of connections to the Internet. E-mail was
a very cost-effective means of communication
when compared to long-distance phone calls and
even postage. The average computer user came to
see e-mail as a convenient means to stay in touch
with people. A very conservative estimate put the
cost of e-mail at roughly fifty thousand e-mails per
dollar spent. In the mid-1990’s, some companies
gave out free e-mail mailboxes and addresses that
were accessible through a Web browser. These Web-
based e-mail offerings further increased the popu-
larity of e-mail and expanded the number of home
users.
Effect on Business Businesses also saw the vast
benefits of e-mail, one of which is that there is no
need to have the communicating parties together at
the same time, as in a phone call or teleconference.
The savings in time alone was reason enough for
most businesses to adopt e-mail as their standard me-
dium of communication. The ability to store and
quickly access e-mail and any attached information
transferred via e-mail increased cost savings. E-mail
became such a vital resource that it was estimated
that many business professionals spent up to fifty
percent of their working time using e-mail. However,
Internet-based businesses estimated that tens of
thousands of dollars were lost per hour if an outage
of their e-mail servers occurred. The drop in com-
munications affected the ability of workers to com-
plete their tasks, resulting in a loss of work-hours
and affecting customer relations.
Businesses also capitalized on the ability to mass-
market to consumers via e-mail. Many customers
could be reached at little or no cost compared to tra-
ditional methods of calling and traditional media
advertising. The business of selling lists of e-mail ad-
dresses became a staple of the mass-mailing industry.Modern Issues with E-mail Abuse of mass e-mailing
created problems as well as business opportunities.
Unsolicited commercial e-mail, commonly referred
to as spam, comes from a business or individual
misusing the system by sending e-mail to a number
of users without their consent. Spam, along with
the propagation of computer viruses sent through
e-mail attachments, became costly nuisances to busi-
nesses and home users and led to the creation of a
multibillion-dollar support industry to fight these
problems. Overreliance on e-mail became a weak
point in many business, to the point where some
were crippled completely during an outage. E-mail
fraud, in which a perpetrator attempts to acquire
personal information from a user, also became a
problem in the late 1990’s.Impact E-mail was rapidly adopted by individuals
and businesses during the 1990’s. Professionals
started to spend a great deal of their time using e-mail
to communicate. The economic effects were vast.
The low cost and convenience of e-mail far out-
weighed the costs of supporting the technology and
the pitfalls of spam, viruses, and outages.Further Reading
Cavanagh, Christina.Managing Your E-Mail: Think-
ing Outside the Inbox. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley &
Sons, 2003. Offers tips on crafting and managing
e-mail and discusses legal issues for employees.
Cortada, James W.The Digital Hand: How Computers310 E-mail The Nineties in America