Emancipated Email

By David Strom

(appeared in Mobile Computing 4/97)

So by now you've no doubt heard that email is the killer application for the Internet. Everyone from the lowest janitor in your corporation to your farthest-flung customer is connected and has his or her own identity at joe@smith.com. And even your grandmother has her own email account so she can see photos of the kids.

The trouble is, dealing with all this email is killing ME, sucking my time away in big gulps. It isn't just volume -- it is the kinds of messages I am now getting, and the obligation I feel to connect at all hours of day and night. Clients asking for overdue reports, colleagues asking for help, strangers wanting a piece of my time. And if I make the mistake of going an entire day without checking my mail, it just gets worse.

Back in the pre-web days (say two years ago), I thought it was sufficient to just carry a laptop and run my favorite Internet-ready mailer, Qualcomm's Eudora. I kept enough room on my hard disk to carefully store all my outgoing messages, and file various incoming ones in their own separate boxes. Call me a frequent filer. This way, if I ever need to find something, I could use the tools in Eudora to track down some correspondence. And every few months or so I actually did this, surprising myself that I could be so organized.

Having all my mail on my laptop was a vast improvement over my prior strategy -- to just leave mail on the corporate server and connect remotely (that was during my cc:Mail era, if you must know). The specialized remote programs have gotten a lot better since then, but it still is a pain to maintain your mail in more than one place. Heck, it is a pain to maintain mail in less than one place too.

But the vast popularity of the Internet has changed all of this. Now I rarely use my electronic filing system, and find that the best strategy is often to leave my laptop at home, saving the weight and weariness of travel. Why? Several reasons. First off, almost everywhere I go I have access to the Internet from a client's or colleagues' office. Then I just use good ole Telnet (available on Macs, Windows and even OS/2) to connect back to my corporate server. I then read mail the old fashioned way, using Pine and character-mode screens. It isn't pretty, but it works (most of the time). I've read my mail on the floor of trade shows, at O'Hare airport concourses, and many other places. This is the ultimate in Thin Client Computing: you don't have to bring any gear along, and you can still stay connected.

If you want to use the web to do this, a number of email products (cc:Mail, Exchange, and GroupWise) now have the ability to collect their messages via a web client. This takes more work than my Telnet/Pine setup but you basically have the same notion: leave the laptop at home and use someone else's machine and web browser when you get to where you are going.

A second reason for this new strategy is security. Carrying all my email correspondence around on my laptop makes me nervous -- what if that precious archive is damaged or stolen? Sure, I backup my hard disk -- but never enough to be secure about it. Better to leave everything back at the office.

Third, hotels still haven't become completely modem-friendly. Ten years ago, I was writing about the troubles of hotels and modems. Now many hotel rooms come with data jacks, but for some reason their phone systems are so noisy that I can't get connected at anything greater than 2400 bps. Better to just wait until I return, or better yet, use the computers that some hotels offer with their own high-speed Internet connection at the business centers or conference areas.

Finally, the real reason for toting a laptop (playing games on planes) is passé -- I'd rather read a trashy novel or catch up on the trade mags. As laptops and my own girth have gotten bigger and airplane seats narrower, it is harder to squeeze us all in and still have room to type.

In the meantime, send me email -- why not?