Introduction to This Special Issue on Revisiting and Reinventing E-Mail

摘要

E-mail is the most successful computer application yet invented. It is used by millions of people to carry out their business each day (Levitt & Mahowald, 2003). Over the last 10 years, e-mail has become ubiquitous in the home, too, and it is often the reason for purchasing a home computer (Kraut, Mukhopadhyay, Szczypula, Kiesler, & Scherlis, 2000). It has changed the way that people work and the ways that organizations operate; many types of collaborative work would be unthinkable without it (Sproull & Kiesler, 1991). Various reasons have been put forward for e-mail's success. Unlike face to face communication, its affordances free participants from the constraints of space and time—allowing senders and recipients to communicate at times and in places that are convenient to each (Clark & Brennan, 1991; Kraut & Attewell, 1997; Sproull & Kiesler, 1991). Another significant property is its malleability. Studies of e-mail usage have repeatedly documented the striking number of different purposes to which it is put: e-mail can support conversations, operate as a task manager, document delivery system, archive, and contact manager—to name but a few (Bellotti et al., 2003; Mackay, 1988; Whittaker, Jones, & Terveen, 2002a; Whittaker & Sidner, 1996). And at a technical level, it operates using a highly simple protocol.