I can’t imagine life without e-mail. It is a near-perfect form of communication for several reasons:

• E-mail allows the user to send a message at a convenient time and allows the recipient to receive the message at another convenient time. Unlike telephone communications, convenient times don’t have to be simultaneous. I can send an e-mail to a relative in Scotland without worrying about waking her or catching her out.
  
  
• E-mail, especially cell-phone and Blackberry e-mail has already proved its worth during a terrorist attack. You have probably already read stories about people who escaped from the World Trade Center / Pentagon disasters and were able to message their loved ones using their Blackberry or cell-phone e-mail. I do not remember the name of the man who spent seven hours walking home from Washington DC, convinced that World War III had started, but I’m willing to bet he now owns one or the other.
  
  
• E-mail allows the sender to review and, if necessary, reword the message before sending. (Experience tells us that users don’t take full advantage of this feature, but lack of widespread use doesn’t negate its value.)
  
  
• E-mail is a lifeline to the hearing impaired.
  
  
• E-mail enables telecommuting. I have laryngitis today, so I will e-mail my current client to let her know I won’t be in the office and volunteer to telecommute. For other clients, telecommuting is my standard method of exchange, from contract negotiations to invoicing. 
  
  
• E-mails can be saved for future reference. I have an e-mail archive in which I save all my communications with clients and prospective clients. This information comes in handy when reviewing the terms of a contract, the client’s wishes for a project, or the names and e-mail addresses of other persons involved with the project.
  
  
• E-mail makes PC Alamode (and client) deadlines easier to manage. When I first started writing for PC Alamode I had to snail mail my articles on floppy disk, meaning that I had to have my articles finished several days before the deadline, make sure I had a blank floppy disk available, make sure I had a floppy disk mailer and adequate postage on hand, and remember my editor’s mailing address. At the time, we could upload to the Bulletin Board System, but I hadn’t yet figured out how to do it.

Admittedly, I don’t get enough e-mail to worry with Spam filters, but I do have a question about them. Maybe one of my readers can clue me in: Is there a Spam filter that allows you to identify friends and family and put them in an “A” list? This would mean that unidentified e-mails would go in the “B” list. You would still have to look in the “B” list, but with a predefined “A” list you would still be able to retrieve your most important e-mails before dealing with the sludge in the “B” list. When you do look at the “B” list, you could identify return addresses that should go in your “A” list, refining your definitions further and further until your “B” list is likely nothing but Spam.

The e-mail programs I work with take a reverse approach: define mail from a certain return address as Spam. The problem with this approach, as we all know, is that Spammers seldom use the same return address twice. This leaves you chasing them around your e-mail program with your blood pressure up and never quite getting rid of them.  Admittedly, under the A-List/ B-list method, Spammers still get in, but they are confined to a less emotionally charged area of your inbox that you can deal with when you have time to worry with mass deletes.

Spam aside, now that we have been at war, I am particularly thankful for e-mail, if not for myself, at least for the families who have members stationed overseas. As the wife of a Vietnam veteran, I admit to a twinge of jealousy when I hear about how comforting e-mail is to those that go and those that are left behind.

In 1970, while my husband served in the 18th Combat Engineering Battalion in Pleiku, my lifeline was the U.S. Postal Service. My daily life was controlled by the existence and quantity of red, white and blue airmail envelopes (with the word “free” where the stamp should go) in my mailbox. On a good day, I would get one. On a great day, I would get several. On a bad day, I would get none. During a nerve-wracking week, I would see several days of empty mailboxes.

Twenty-seven years later, when our college-age daughter left for Argentina for a semester of study abroad, we were able to take advantage of the exhilarating speed and availability of e-mail. Phone calls were possible, but expensive and complicated, especially since I’m hearing impaired and my Spanish is painfully limited (Argentines, it seems don’t understand the dialect of Spanish they teach in San Antonio.) Laura used the University computer center to send us messages several times a week, and if we needed an answer to a question, we could e-mail her in the morning and usually have an answer by evening.

As I write this, CNN (Cable News Network) offers more evidence of the amazing power of e-mail. Wolfgang Blitzer relates a rumor that a former Iraqi government official may have sent a mass e-mail to the remaining members of Saddam Hussein’s regime telling them to get out while the getting’s good. Mr. Blitzer cannot confirm whether this is real or apocryphal, but the absence of government control certainly makes it appear that such a mailing was sent. How amazing to think that the remainder of a whole regime could be dispersed using the same mechanism through which we receive Spam.

I related this story on the phone to my husband at work. He doubts that the Iraqis regime still possessed that kind of technology (if it ever had it to begin with.) He speculates that the Americans, however, could have Spammed Saddam’s loyalists.

A recent article by Dan Morse and Jesse Drucker in the Wall Street Journal, “Soldier Helps 101st Stay Wired to Home,” tells of PFC Dustin Price who runs Cat 5 cables across the desert floor in order to keep the members of his and other units (300 soldiers as of the time of the article) connected to e-mail.  If Price can do that, I’m sure he or some other American technie genius over could put together an e-mal that could get past Iraqi Spam filters.