5.02 E-mail plus and minus

E-mail has become the universal means of electronic communication and the most popular online technology. Lets look at its advantages and drawbacks.

Convenience
The main advantage of e-mail for both the sender and the recipient is convenience. When you send an e-mail, you can do so at a time to suit your routine. The person you are sending it to can collect it when they have the time. A phone call, by way of comparison, demands that both parties find time simultaneously. You may have a quiet moment but your client is missing a favourite soap. You've got a full waiting room when your client has put the baby to bed.

Brevity
E-mail has developed its own syntax. Recipients expect information in a succinct form. Creating an e-mail when you have a brief message to send can be the work of moments. Many longer messages, sent regularly, can be simply copied and edited to suit the specific recipient.

Clarity
When you have a longer message, or when a client has a broader query, then the process of creating an e-mail can help to get the point you wish to make set out clearly. The recipient has the whole text to refer back to as well – unlike the misunderstandings common to telephone conversations.

On the record
E-mails create their own record – unlike phone calls which may require you to take notes for the patient record.

On the negative side
The popularity of e-mail has meant that the technology has attracted the attentions of various parties with their own agenda.

Spam
Unsolicited commercial e-mails, commonly known as spam, have reduced some of the convenience of e-mail by adding a lot of time-wasting noise to everyones mailboxes. Spam works because the e-mails are so cheap to send, effectively free, that it only takes one person in millions to buy a product to make it worthwhile. Meanwhile the other millions minus one have to assess the message and wear out their delete button. Spam filtration is getting better and legislation is attempting to deal with the problem but there will probably always be a background level of spam to ignore.

Viruses
Basic e-mail is just a text file and can't do your computer any harm. Viruses, the e-mail born variety anyway, are carried in attachments to a basic e-mail and have to be run as programs on your computer before they can drop their payload. Html e-mail, that's e-mail that displays with coloured fonts, backgrounds and borders, is effectively an attachment that runs automatically and used to be a major route for viruses. Nowadays the virus writers have to develop psychological tricks to gets recipients to click on attachments before they will run. You should ensure that any computer used to collect e-mail has a virus scanning program running – and that its virus definitions are up to date.

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