The age of E-Mail - how to use and sign up for electronic mail - includes glossary - Buyers Guide

Home Office Computing, Dec, 1993 by Michael Maren

"The hardest thing to believe about e-mail is that there are still people who aren't using it!" says Mary Ellen Bates, whose home-based business exists almost entirely in the ether of digital communications. She runs Bates Information Services, a research firm in Washington, D.C. Her clients hire her to scope out what's happening in everything from government agencies to the market for lollipops. Anything they want, she finds. And most of the information she delivers never sees paper.

Bates researches online, through services such as Lexis/Nexis and Dialog (massive databases of newspaper and magazine articles) and CompuServe. Then she compiles and arranges the information on her computer and delivers the text to her clients via MCI Mail, her e-mail carrier. The monthly $10 fee costs less than stamps would for mailing the same material and requires a fraction of the bother. E-mail also allows Bates to quickly send out updates as information becomes available. "My clients love this service," she says, "and I couldn't afford to do it if I had to take the time to write up comments, print them on letterhead, and send the whole thing via first-class mail."

As more people in small business discover the ease, economy, and effectiveness of e-mail communications, conducting business electronically may soon become the norm. Referring to the U.S. Postal Service as snail mail, users of e-mail quickly become devotees and then lobby clients and friends to jump aboard. "In a few years, everyone will assume that you have an e-mail address," says Bill Moroney, executive director of the Electronic Mail Association. "E-mail is at the stage the fax was at a few years ago." As director of an industry group, you'd expect Moroney to be biased, but among e-mail users, it's impossible to find anyone who disagrees with him.

THE GREAT LEVELER

It took the big e-mail providers, such as MCI, Sprint, and AT&T, a while to understand that between Fortune 2000 corporations sending e-mail over local area networks (LANs) and hackers trading information about Grateful Dead concerts on BBSs, there lay a huge and important market in small and home-based businesses. It was for them that e-mail would become a crucial component, providing needed flexibility and access to information and clients.

The growth of the Internet (see "Under Construction: Information Superhighway," August 1993), a massive web of networks, online services, and BBSs, was also crucial to e-mail's proliferation. The Internet, along with a communication language called X.400, allows a person working from home on, say, CompuServe to route a message to an individual in a corporation wired with a LAN and MCI Mail. This proves to be one of the most effective aspects of e-mail for the home entrepreneur. "When you're doing business with a big company and using e-mail, you're as close as the desk down the hall," says Moroney. "You can become as intimate a business partner with a company in Rangoon as with one in your hometown." Patrick Gannon runs what he calls a virtual office. Gannon,

who worked for Digital Equipment Corp. for 10 years, formed Hummingbird Software Corp. last year. "My programming partner is in Texas. I'm in Nevada. We communicate daily via CIS [CompuServe] mail," Gannon says. "We also have clients at major Fortune 100 companies who use MCI Mail, and we keep in touch with them regularly via X.400 from our CIS accounts."

As Gannon discovered, e-mail is for much more than messages. Anything that is in digital form--software, sounds, graphics files--can be attached to an e-mail message. "We have even found it more economical and faster to e-mail software upgrades via CIS/X.400," he says. A 200K file takes approximately 16 minutes to transmit at 2400 bps and costs $2.08 to send from CompuServe. In addition, most e-mail systems can automatically send you a confirmation notice when the message is received--usually at a small cost.

Gannon recently landed his first big account--a major petrochemical company. He attributes his success directly to the access provided by e-mail: "For me, the real advantage is that, as a small company, I can do work for the biggies. The ability to communicate has been a major sales capability for us." And, Gannon points out, the ability to run his office from anywhere at any time has allowed him to live the lifestyle he wants.

HOW TO GET ONLINE

There are three basic ways to get up and running with e-mail. Each offers different advantages in pricing and ease of use.

1. Subscribe to an online service. If you've never used e-mail, start out on a commercial online service, using simple, graphical software. CompuServe, for example, has an easy-to-use graphical front end called CompuServe Information Manager (free in membership kits, [800] 848-8199), available for DOS, Windows, and the Macintosh, and an offline Navigator program (see this month's Previews) for Windows and the Mac. America Online provides free software with a simple point-and-click graphical interface. If you want to attach a file to your e-mail, for instance, just click on the picture of the paper clip and then browse through your directories to choose the file.