h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There are advantages & disadvantages to both systems.
I've lived more than half my life without email & find it's great to be able to tap away on the keyboard & send something off, hopefully perfected, with minimum fuss & bother. I think one can express the desired emotion equally well in either medium - just faster with email, tho' there's no guarantee it will arrive or be read straight away in either format.
The speed of email communication can be very useful, but I don't like feeling under pressure to respond instantly. Do we need to live life this fast? Hasty replies might be ill thought out & unwise.
The main disadvantage for me is that if documents/info are sent to me, I have to spend my time & resources printing out if I want hard copy.

Until everybody has easy daily email access, both systems will be important and even then, I can't forsee snail mail of some form disappearing just yet.

There's also something about seeing personal handwriting. Because of the ease of falsifying print, I suspect we won't see emails appearing in collected volumes or on the Antiques Roadshows of the future.

Snailmail demonstrates genuine thought and a willingness to spend actual real money. But by giving out your real home address you're sending out an invitation to every nut in range.

For ease and speed and safety email can't be beat. But it lacks that personal touch and for some cash may be an issue.

You raise a good point when you say you don't like feeling under pressure to respond instantly.

They're now finding that overly connected people have huge amounts of stress in their lives that previous generations have never had for precisely this reason. How often have you received an email and had a phone call from the sender only a few hours later asking "did you read my email?" I've had this happen at work a number of times. Sometimes, they haven't even waited an hour.

People feel obligated to read an email the instant their mail client says "You've got mail".

It takes a lot of personal discipline to decide "no, I'll respond to this email later today or tomorrow. " Sort of like ignoring a ringing telephone when you have someone in your office. They'll call back if it was important and if they don't, chances are you didn't really need to talk to them in the first place.

Yes, I don't use an answering machine/ message facility at home. If it's really important, they'll keep trying, if not I don't need to waste my time & money returning the call.

that's not very nice why should the person who called you have to do all the work over and over. In any case you can express just as much emotion in an e-mail as you can express in a letter. (just for free)

I counter with the question: why should the person be allowed to interrupt what I'm doing? Or, in the case of a clerk serving a customer, why should the customer who is being served have to wait while the clerk answers the phone? I've walked away from sales when the clerk has done that.

Also, email is not free. There are non-trivial resources at work that allow you to send and receive email.

I used to write a lot of letters, by hand and enjoyed doing it. Now email means that I can write letters several times a day, fantastic!!
Unlike being on the phone you can do other things at the same time, it's quick and you can stop half way through and go back to it later and you don't have to do all that tedious finding an envelope remembering to buy stamps and remembering to post it and then wait for a few weeks while the other person gets round to replying finding stamps etc etc.
I do associate email with fun letters though. anything official I still deal with via snail mail, I must have a bit of Luddite in me that thinks there's always a possibilty that doing anything via a pc could wind up disappearing / getting lost easier than paper.

I know people who depend on e-mail. For them, it's a lifeline to friends they might not otherwise be able to contact regularly. However, in many offices e-mail has replaced a great deal of interaction, to the point where conversations are had over a matter of hours with mails ping-ponging back and forth when it would be faster to walk over and see the person.

The other major disadvantage to e-mail is that it has empowered a certain section of the population to share tasteless images, humourless jokes and incredibly annoying chain letters with anyone and everyone they think will apreciate such a gesture. The perpetuation of virus hoaxes, the continual sending and resending of incredibly complex mails that are forwarded on to an ever growing list of recipients...it's a form of madness, like lemmings rushing towarda cliff.

And, of course, where you get technology interacting with people you also get the people who don't or won't understand it. The person who keeps ALL of their correspondance in their IN box and never deletes anything, eventually maxxing out an entire server and bringing the mail service to it's knees...or this true story:

User A is off on holiday. He sets his Office account to forward to his home account, then sets an Out of Office Reply. He goes home and sets his home account to forward to his office account, and sets another reply. Then he leaves.
The next day, someone sends him an e-mail.
Mail 1 hits the office account, generating a reply and a forward. The forward hits his home account, generating a reply and a forward.
This is where the fun starts: the reply from home to office hits the office account and generates a reply and a forward. The forward from the home account generates a reply and a forward. Four mails now scoot off to the home account, generating two responses each. Eight mails come back, generating 16 responses, which generate 32, then 64, then 128...and so on.
This process continues for approximately an hour, with replication ocurring every two minutes or so, before the network guys realise what is going on and put a stop to it.
User A returns to a disabled mail account at work, a flooded one at home and a very gentle telling off from the IT department (who use the incident to justify an upgrade and some user education).

E-mail, while useful, can be a real Pandora's box when in the wrong hands.

Pandora's Box.... I can relate to that....

I run my own mail server. A spammer bumped up against an anti-spam mechanism which generated a warning. The warning went to a bogus address the spammer was using on a poorly configured my machine which generated a non-RFC compliant bounce. This bounce went back, hit the anti-spam stuff and a warning was generated....

100000+ times.

I was surprised to find my mail server, which had 1Gb free when I left Friday night was out of drive space.

I've since turned off the warning function in the anti-spam stuff. I've also configured my mailserver to never talk to the spammer's block of addresses again.

What if you're not home, and what is it's urgent?

Isn't that what having a mobile phone/pager is for? Be wary of who has the power to contact you.
Urgent is really only something literally life & death where you are needed to act to save life/ be at a loved one's bedside.
Anything else can wait until you are available or be delegated to someone else.

I once received a voicemail marked urgent from my bank. Because of the way my voicemail was configured, when a message marked urgent came in, it would attempt to call me at a couple of different numbers. When it reached me and I listened to the message, my eyes came out on stalks.

It wasn't life or death, it was to tell me about a new banking product. When I returned the call, I spoke to the representative and said "under no circumstances should you be flagging voice mail messages as urgent for something like this". Not getting that warm fuzzy feeling, I had a conversation with their supervisor who was shocked, made a note on my file that this was never to be repeated and they had a conversation with the representative who had called me.

I haven't had any voicemail messages from the bank since trying to tell me about any new products.