THE CUTTING EDGE : Mailbox Runneth Over? You Must Be Using E-Mail

Not long ago, electronic mail was the province of the electronic elite. Admittance was attained only after demonstrated mastery of arcane computer commands and willingness to plunk down large sums for equipment.

In those days, e-mailers were a small and, yes, cozy community of tech-heads, academics and the occasional underage hacker. On the rare instance that members of the general public penetrated the digital domain, they were greeted with surprise and courtesy. People you could never reach by phone answered e-mail in person.

But the golden age of e-mail is fast coming to an end. The rush toward the electronic frontier has almost overnight turned a modest cybercolony into an overrun metropolis, leaving some of its longtime inhabitants pining for the old days, and flailing, along withthe newcomers, to devise a way to cope.

“There was a time when I got irritated at 15 messages,” says John Trimble, a professor of business economics at Washington State University. Recently, he hit a personal best, logging 678 e-mail missives in a day. “Wading through them all can be pretty depressing.”

Suddenly, e-mail is hip. MTV video jockey Adam Curry has an electronic address. So did the athletes at this winter’s Olympics; Tonya Harding even had the privilege of having hers tapped into by a clique of hacker wanna-be journalists. Vice President Al Gore flaunts his Internet account as a sign that he’s more cutting-edge than he looks. And the once-nerdy Net is now being used as a symbol of social empowerment: “We’re here, we’re queer, we have e-mail” reads the T-shirt slogan of the recently founded Digital Queers.

Snail mail, of course, still dominates. But Americans bought more computers than televisions last Christmas season, and plummeting prices threaten to equip half of all U.S. households with the devices within a year. E-mail is also getting easier to use, with point-and-click graphics beginning to replace Byzantine Unix commands.

Businesses too are rapidly expanding their use of on-line communication. A recent study at one medium-size firm estimated that it could save more than $100,000 a year in long-distance telephone costs if even 25% of its staff was hooked up to the Internet, although it’s unclear whether the study took account of potential lost productivity from the inevitable Net addictions that would arise.

In February, 1993, 476 million e-mail messages pulsed across the fiber-optic backbone of the Internet, run by the National Science Foundation--double the number from the previous year. By last February , the number had nearly doubled again, to 837 million.

Obviously, people like e-mail. It fosters the exchange of ideas, has revived the art of letter writing (in a different way) and maybe saved some trees.

But the influx of the masses into cyberspace raises myriad questions, such as: When is e-mail junk mail? What constitutes “free speech” on-line? And perhaps most important, how in the Netgod’s name to deal with mailboxes overflowing with digital communiques?

By now, for example, most everyone knows that e-mail inspires boldness in the shy, humor in the stodgy and eloquence in the bland.

“On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” says a dog at a computer in a New Yorker cartoon, his soul presumably roaming free in cyberspace, where the banality of physical form matters not.

E-mail’s cachet wore off quickly at the Clinton Administration, for example, which has already resorted to an electronic form letter for their man on the electronic frontier. An e-mail message to Vice President Gore elicits the following response from “autoresponder@Whitehouse.gov”:

“Thank you for responding to the vice president via Internet. . . . Unfortunately the very large volume of mail received by the Vice President from citizens around the nation prevents him from sending a more detailed and direct response at this time. Please be assured, however, that your correspondence has been read carefully. . . .”

Tips on future White House e-mailings from director of vice presidential correspondence Bill Mason include: “Write short and concise messages, address only one issue per message, and send only one copy of your message.”

On mailing lists--topical discussion groups whose members send e-mail to all participants at once--the failure to include a relevant subject heading begets “flames” like the following from a recent posting to a list about the future of newspapers: “Today alone I have almost a dozen messages with the ‘Re: your mail’ subject lines and another subject line that bothers me--’Unknown subject.’ I’m sick of being forced to call up dozens of pieces of mail because the subject lines are misleading.”

This can be especially annoying for subscribers to services that charge the receiver “postage due” for opening mail. Other typical offenses include posting private e-mail on public mailing lists and mass e-mailings of unsolicited product pitches.

Longtime members of the e-mail elite are resorting to multiple accounts, using “bounce” to automatically return unwanted authors and subjects, and retaliating against junk-mail offenders (advertisers, mostly) by stuffing the senders’ mailboxes with “junk replies.” These range from recipes for kale and tempeh stir-fry to more direct expressions of hostility.

Kraig Meyer of El Segundo-based Aerospace Corp. came back to almost 1,000 new messages when he took a two-week vacation last year. He’s coped by writing several programs that will sort and file messages based on the subject line or sender.

“I tried having two accounts, one ‘unlisted’ and one for subscriptions, but that didn’t work,” says Leslie Carlin, who uses e-mail to keep in touch with her Los Angeles friends from her new home in North Carolina. “I found myself avoiding the ‘task’ of going through the subscribed account, but then also missing useful information, often with deadlines. Now I’m back to just one mailbox, and I plow through the ‘junk,’ enjoying messages from people I know as special treats. It’s not quick, though.”

Last month, America Online, a previously self-contained information service, unleashed its nearly 1 million subscribers onto the Internet, a network of networks that is essentially public and not owned by any one organization. Consternation has reached a fever pitch.

“The joke over the last few weeks is ‘Hey, why don’t you have an aol.com address like all the other idiots?’ ” notes Joshua Geller, a systems administrator at a Santa Monica telecommunications firm, adding: “There are certain, not really rules, but customs, that people follow, and they just don’t get it.”

Nicholas Negroponte, who heads the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, has managed to keep his e-mail down to 30 or 40 thoughtful and relevant messages a day with one account, largely through force of will.

“That number is low,” Negroponte writes from an Internet node in Gutersloh, Germany. “It is low because I am on no mailing lists whatsoever. It is also low because people know that I live or die on e-mail and will not send gratuitous cc’s or dare crap up my mailbox with more noise than message.”

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, whose e-mail address was published earlier this year in a New Yorker magazine story and is reputed to be receiving up to 3,000 messages a day, offers this vision of e-mail’s future--conveyed, it must be noted, electronically via the Internet:

“Eventually, there will be an approach where strangers who want to get someone’s attention will have to say if they are willing to pay to get someone’s attention. The person who reads the mail will have folders with the amounts marked on them. When you read a message you can decide to cancel the charge if you decide it was really worth reading for free.”

Sounds simple, but e-mail advertising in any form is a major source of contention on the Net, where the prevailing ethos is an odd mix of equal parts libertarianism and commune.

James McBride, whose Los Altos-based marketing firm a year ago began collecting e-mail addresses by category and selling them to clients who used them to send advertisements, said he quit recently due to all the flak.

“People who don’t like it will send you back hundreds of messages a day just for the hell of it, as an irritation,” McBride says. “Everybody feels it’s their job to police the Internet.”

McBride instead turned his address lists into the first analog cyberspace phone book. Published by IDG, the Internet White Pages hit stores last month.

Gates, perhaps the most e-mailed man around, still comes down strongly in favor: “I still read all the e-mail I get. All of the e-mail from internal or any one I know I read the same day it comes in. I separate out the mail that comes from strangers across the Internet into a separate folder and sometimes I fall as much as a week behind on that. This doesn’t mean I answer every piece of mail, but I don’t answer most of the mail I get from the post office, either.”