Last volume I gave you an overview of E-mail, the
original Internet facility. This volume I'll deal with E-mail in the
current context. Along the way I'll talk about the various flavours,
facilities, and problems of today's E-mail environment.
Friends and Family
E-mail has become one of the best ways for today's busy people to keep
in touch with each other. Time has become one of life's precious
commodities. Catching a time when both (or several) people are available
can be a chore, so the use of the asynchronous E-mail facility allows a
fairly rapid (at times) banter while allowing for disasters, kids, dinner,
and the washroom; not necessarily in that order.
The Work Place
The work place is where my use of E-mail became a way of life. Prior to
our Wimsey days, my customers were all connected via E-mail to my
office-in-the-home over the UUCP dial network. All of them had Unix/Xenix
based systems, and all were required (by me) to have a dial account with
one of the bulletin boards that connected to the UseNet/UUCP network.
During the 1980's this was the way to connect many systems that were not
part of a proprietary network system. Several of them still use the same
systems.
Having E-mail in the workplace has brought up many different problems,
starting with basic privacy concerns; who can/does read E-mail? In any
system dealing with computers in the work place, there are those who use
the facility, those who own it, and those who run it. These three groups
(or individuals) each have various combinations of abilities, rights,
responsibilities and access.
As a corporate mail user you have the ability to read your mail
and send mail to others. You may have the ability to send and
receive mail as "yourself" separately from "you as an
employee". You probably (definitely) have a responsibility to
represent your company in an ethical and reasonable manner in all your
communications - spoken, written, and electronic. You probably don't
have the "right" to privacy - something you didn't
realize.
The fact is that since the computers and systems you use at work are
the property of the company you work for, all of the work and
correspondence you do using them is considered property of the company,
and they can do with it pretty much as they please. They can decide that
the backups they made of their systems for the past 10 years (that contain
copies of your private E-mail area) are the company's property and that
they can look through it for whatever they like. In fact, the courts can
make the same decision, and have. If you work for a government body in
Canada (or other countries), you might even find that your private E-mail
has become part of the public record, and is subject to Freedom of Access
Legislation.
Attachments
When E-mail was first conceived, it was a text only medium. Messages
were pure text with no opportunity to add pictures, sound, or other data.
In fact, the basic Internet E-mail system (SMTP or Simple Mail Transport
Protocol) simply can't use anything but printable characters - a small
fraction of the available characters in the 8-bit ASCII character set that
the is the original standard of the Internet. In order to send a picture
or other "binary" data, it must be encoded so that it only uses
the printable characters - and then decoded at the recipient's end back
into its original form.
The most generally used encoding form up until recently grew out of the
"UseNet/UUCP" dial network and is called "uuencode".
More recently MIME (Multi-part Internet Mail Extension) encoding has
become the most ubiquitous standard.
Most mailers today will recognize that an attachment has been sent,
decode it, and present it using what it thinks is the most appropriate
program you have on your computer. You may not even know what machinations
the mailer had to go through to extract the attachment and present it to
you - if everything goes well. The problem is that it (still) doesn't
always go right. Not only do many senders assume that you have the same or
equivalent programs to what they have, the client programs themselves are
not necessarily compatible.
In fact, Microsoft seems to be working towards allowing someone to send
you an attachment that will run a program on your computer without you
even having to ask it. Think of it, your friends can tell your computer to
pop up a "Happy Birthday" message at midnight - play a song, and
put gala graphics on the screen.
Then think about it again after you read the next section.
When the original sponsor of the Internet, the US government, decided
to step away from the project and open it up to commercial operation, the
AUP (Acceptable Usage Policy) that had limited use to academic, research,
military, and education uses ended. The concept that the Internet is
"free" led many to believe that they had the right to send
unsolicited E-mail messages to anyone and everyone they could identify,
touting all manner of products and services. What they didn't (and still
don't) realize is that the recipient paid to receive those messages. These
unsolicited commercial E-mail messages have been called "SPAM",
after the Monty Python song "SPAM, SPAM, SPAM".
As a fairly extreme example, in early times, AOL (America OnLine) had a
policy of charging for each and every E-mail message that its customers
received. This was in the days when AOL was a closed BBS (Bulletin Board
System), albeit a very large one. The growth of the Internet and the
E-mail revolution that it began caused AOL to connect and pass E-mail
between their closed BBS and the wide open Internet (and UseNet to which
it was connected). The problem was that AOL charged their customers for
the incoming mail but it didn't cost the Internet sender anything (except
the cost of their connection to the 'Net - much less than the message cost
to the AOL user).
Today, the cost of receiving a single E-mail message in terms of the
cost of the connection to the Internet is really not that much. Modems are
faster, and costs per hour or (in most cases) per month are lower. What
hasn't gone down is the cost of winnowing through these unwanted messages
to get to the messages we really expect and want. Not only that, but many
SPAMers use subterfuge to send their thousands and millions of copies of
messages so that third parties, people and companies with E-mail servers
that might not be secured as well as they maybe should be, pay the bulk of
the cost of sending the messages out. This in fact constitutes theft of
services.
Today SPAM is simply one of the hazards of using the Internet for
E-mail. Your address might be gathered from almost anything you do on the
Internet: visit a web page, mail your friend, post an article to a news
group, subscribe to a mail list, or even simply by the brute force method
of guessing. While there are a number of things you can do to reduce the
possibility of getting onto a list, and some that you might do to get list
users in trouble with whoever allows them to connect to the 'Net, most of
them are a royal pain in the behind, and none will completely stop your
reception of SPAM.
I still receive SPAM addressed to my original Wimsey account, one which
I haven't used or admitted to since 1997.
in progress
