The e-mail monster

ANYONE WHO HAS spent time on the technology watch knows how often "paradigm shifts" and "new industrial revolutions" are announced -- and how seldom they actually come to pass.

In August 1992, CIO ran a story describing a change in the architectures that supported and defined e-mail. The article pointed out that as a result, opportunities might arise "to enhance a variety of business activities." This mild forecast turned out to be true in the same sense that Noah's meteorologist could claim points for predicting scattered showers.

Up through the '80s, e-mail was not a central concern of CIOs. For all but the largest or most technical companies, e-mail was outsourced to dialup message switching services such as CompuServe or MCIMail. E-mail services were expensive (often 20 cents or more a message), dial-up connections measured out their bandwidth in teaspoons, and the software was primitive and inconvenient. Sending mail between messaging services was especially burdensome, often requiring the faultless entry of huge address strings. There was an alternative called the Internet, but it was of interest mostly to Unix junkies.

The point of the article was that all these walls were coming down at once. Enterprises were installing local-area networks, which meant they could take their internal e-mail traffic in-house and deliver it for free over their own (relatively) high-bandwidth Ethernet networks. New standards such as Microsoft's object linking and embedding (OLE) made it possible to attach various types of files and multimedia to messages. Companies were building gateways that handled the job of routing calls among messaging services and even over the Internet without demanding the sender have a degree in computer science. Taken together, these developments "promise to bring electronic mail to its full potential as a strategic information-handling resource," we concluded soberly.

As it turned out, e-mail emerged like one of those volcanoes that pop up in the fields and surprise Mexican farmers: One day there's steam curling up out of the corn patch, and a year later a lava-drooling mountain is raining fire on the countryside. That's e-mail. According to Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, a sister company to CIO's publisher, CXO Media, about 2 billion business-related e-mails were sent daily in 1999, which is approximately 10 times the number sent in 1995.

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