Technologies of Text
Communication

Email

Yara
November 17, 2023
Image shows a man and a woman. The man is holding a folder and a digital letter. The woman is on her laptop and is typing and sending an email.
Sending and receiving emails. From SoftwareSuggest.

Email is a technology of text that allows us to send electronic mail. It’s a form of communication that’s used within corporations, and other organizations, or institutions such as schools or universities. Email allows us to send a message to either one person, or to multiple people at once.

How it started

Let’s begin by going back in time to look at the history of the development of email1. Ray Tomlinson developed Electronic mail in 1972 and was it introduced as a tool to facilitate coordination within the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), which is the first wide-area packet-switched network (Leiner et al., 1997).

How it works

Now let’s take a look at the process of sending an email2, email goes through a process called the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) process in order to get from the sender to the receiver. The TCP/IP consists of 4 main operations:

Image shows the 4 layers that an email goes through from the sender to the receiver. The 4 layers are the application, transport, internetwork and network access layer.
Image shows the 4 layers that an email goes through from the sender to the receiver. From Springer Link.

The Four Main Operations

The first operation is defining the packets, the message is divided up into packets so that it can be transported from the sender to the receiver.

The second operation is transporting that data from the Network Access Layer to the Transport Layer, which means that the Internetwork Layer can be seen as a medium between the first and third layers.

The third operation is where the packets pick their routes.

Finally, the packets are reassembled after they reach their destination (Alani, 2014).

Image shows diagram that shows how a message is divided up into packets and shows how they travel from the sender to the receiver.
The diagram shows how a message is divided up into packets and shows how it travels from the sender to the receiver. From GeeksforGeeks.

Why we use email

We use email because it’s the quicker and modern alternative to traditional mail, although we still write emails in the same format as we would write traditional mail. Initially, we used to use email to communicate with family, friends and organizations, but now we transitioned to mostly using it to communicate within educational institutions and organizations.

Our shift in use of email is due to the disturbance of the work-life balance. The disturbance made us start to associate email with work, which resulted in us resorting to other communication apps, such as WhatsApp and other social media platforms to communicate with our family and friends.

Image shows a sample format for an email
Image shows the format of a formal email. From LeaveBoard.
Image shows the format of a formal letter.
Image shows the format of a formal letter. From 7ESL.

Why we like it

  • Email improves effective communication regardless of time and distance, which positively affected organizations and educational institutions (Berghel,1997).
  • Much faster communication than communicating through traditional mail (Berghel,1997). Sending an email takes an instant at least and 30 minutes at most, whereas traditional mail takes from 1-45 working days3.
  • Emails are better for the environment, since it doesn’t use paper (Berghel,1997). Imagine how much paper we would be using if we still communicated through traditional mail today!
Man is overwhelmed by the amount of emails he is receiving
Steve Harvey is feeling overwhelmed because he is receiving too many emails. From GIPHY

Why we don’t

  • The amount of emails we receive per day, The Guardian states that 205bn emails are sent per day in 2015, with no indication of that number going down as it was set to exceed 246bn emails per day in 2019 (Gibbs, 2016).
  • We are all familiar with and know how annoying spamming can be. Unfortunately, the first documentation of spamming was in 1994 by two lawyers from Phoenix, Laurence Carter and Martha Siegel (Gibbs, 2016).
  • Disturbs people’s work-life balance, the constant communication has resulted in employees working outside of work hours, which makes employees feel like they are pressured to respond quickly (Guirge, 2022).
  • Employers monitoring emails sent by their employees within their organization

References

Leiner, B. M., Cerf, V. G., Clark, D. D., Kahn, R. E., Kleinrock, L., Lynch, D. C., Postel, J., Roberts, L. G., & Wolff, S. S. (1997). The Past and Future History of the Internet. Communications of the ACM, 40(2), 102–108. https://doi.org/10.1145/253671.253741

Berghel, H. (1997, April 1). Email-the good, the bad, and the ugly. Communications of the ACM. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/248448.248450

Alani, M. M. (2014, January 1). Guide to OSI and TCP/IP models. SpringerLink. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-05152-9

Gibbs, S. (2016, March 7). How did email grow from messages between academics to a global epidemic? The Guardian. Retrieved November 6, 2023, from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/07/email-ray-tomlinson-history

Guirge, L. (2022, January 31). Avoid sending emails outside working hours—your colleagues will thank you. Forbes. Retrieved November 6, 2023, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/lbsbusinessstrategyreview/2022/01/31/avoid-sending-emails-outside-working-hoursyour-colleagues-will-thank-you-for-it/?sh=3c40d4111283

  1. https://doi.org/10.1145/253671.253741 ↩︎
  2. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-05152-9 ↩︎
  3. https://www.emiratespost.ae/faq ↩︎