Electronic Mail: It's Time to Get Real!


Copyright 1991 CAUSE From _CAUSE/EFFECT_ Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 1991. 
Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is 
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ELECTRONIC MAIL: IT'S TIME TO GET REAL!
by Charles R. Thomas

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Charles R. Thomas is currently a Senior Consultant with the National
Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS)
specializing in strategic planning for computing and information
technology, and President of the Consortium for Higher Education
Software Services, Inc. (CHESS). He is a former Vice President of
Information Associates and served as the first Executive Director of
CAUSE from 1971 to 1986.

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As a member of the higher education computing community since Illiac I
in 1958 and a bonafide denizen of the electronic ozone since Stanford
University's first "Terminals for Managers" program in 1980, I have
watched all of, and participated in a good bit of, the entire evolution
of computing in colleges and universities. In over three decades, I have
seen the "human-machine interface" advance from unforgiving punched
paper tape to friendly graphic user interfaces with pull-down menus.
Even with the aid of rolling rodents, light pens, touch-sensitive
screens, and voice-response technology, however, electronic mail systems
remain in the "too-hard basket" for the average user.

How to discourage widespread use

Early naming conventions, both for individuals and for nodes in the
network, were enough to aggravate the average audacious academic
acronymizer. Fortunately, computer account names made up of nonsensical
combinations of letters and numbers are beginning to fade as the age of
user friendliness ushers in the radical idea of using people's real
names, or at least some form thereof. Even some of the networks are
beginning to identify institutions by words that can be generally
recognized at least twice in a row. As a casual perusal of any national
association's membership directory will verify, however, arcane
electronic mail addresses and institutional node names are still very
much in evidence. The good news is, membership lists, conference
attendance lists, and even some institutional staff directories are
beginning to list electronic mail addresses along with telephone and FAX
numbers.

While BITNET addresses for many institutions were, and to a great
extent still are, unnecessarily complex acronyms identifying the
institution and the computer all in one quasi-word, the new Internet
naming conventions have at least tried to decode the nodes. Already,
however, I notice some very lengthy Internet names which jam
abbreviations of all of the words in the formal institutional name
together to create a very lengthy and almost unreadable alias. If
difficulties arise in identifying a short name for every institution, I
would suggest that it has already been done, and on a mass-media scale.
Simply watch the sports section of any local or national television news
broadcast and you will find short names for every institution
participating in inter-collegiate athletics. Not many sports fans, nor
sportscasters for that matter, would recognize "Virginia Polytechnic
Institute and State University," but "Virginia Tech" would identify that
institution in a minute, and the same would be true for Cal Poly on the
West Coast.

Further, for some institutional addresses, Internet includes the
specific network node within the campus. It is easy enough to recognize
the technical problems associated with keeping track of all those campus
computer installations and local area networks, but it would appear we
have allowed network gurus to give up too easily on the liberal concept
of a centralized institutional directory. Contemplate for a moment an
institutional faculty/staff directory that required you to know a
colleague's department before you could look up a telephone number.

Then there is the out-dated hat-in-hand procedure of applying to
the computer center for an electronic mail account. Ever-vigilant
auditors point out that a signature is required to assure responsibility
for computing resource utilization and to verify that the supplicant is
aware of all of the institutional rules surrounding computer and
information usage. I would suggest that every faculty and staff member,
as well as every student, signs dozens of similar forms as a condition
of employment or enrollment at the institution, so the addition of one
more piece of paper at that time would be a minor marginal cost in time
and effort rather than a total cost at a later time. Moreover, the
institutionalization of electronic communication on the campus would be
enhanced by providing every member of the academic community with an
electronic mail account immediately upon their entry, or at least
shortly thereafter. After all, would anyone on campus consider not
having a telephone number listed in the faculty/staff/student directory?

Several institutions have come up with the novel solution of having
the human resources department maintain electronic mail addresses, just
as they maintain the files that produce the faculty/staff directory. In
fact, some have taken the concept one step further: that same department
also maintains several tables of names for standard institutional
distribution lists. When a new dean is appointed, the "deans"
distribution list is automatically changed for everyone on the campus.
Another advantage of this approach is that departing faculty/staff
members are automatically removed from the electronic mail address list
unless exception procedures are initiated. Computer installations are
becoming more security conscious, but some past hacker incidents have
resulted from the failure to cancel a former employee's computer access.

Following this philosophy into the information structure of the
institution, the registrar could be responsible for maintaining the
files that contain student electronic mail addresses, and the student
affairs office could coordinate the distribution lists for different
participatory groups on campus. Again, this activity would occur at a
marginal cost, since most of these offices are already maintaining
extensive files on students and separate semi-proprietary lists of
individuals.

E-Mail for real people

For a campus electronic mail system to be fully usable by even the
technologically disadvantaged, whether by circumstance or by choice, I
suggest that it should follow the principle of "minimum astonishment."
That principle is made up of two parts: (1) I never want to have to
remember a single thing; and (2) I never want to wonder what to do next.
My eyes glaze over the first time a technician says: "All you have to
remember is ... ." And how many times have you had to take the 
ungracious exit from a piece of software by turning your desktop 
computer off, then back on? Then, of course, the most unwelcome advice 
is: "We offer a three-day class on that package." Everyone has three 
spare days to devote to learning how to send an electronic message!

From the user's perspective there are a few other criteria that
would make the ideal electronic mail system practical for widespread
campus use.

The desktop computer software must operate both in the IBM-
compatible and in the Apple Macintosh environments which are ubiquitous
on most campuses. Few academics want or need to maintain multiple
keyboards in their offices or laboratories, so UNIX workstations must be
supported. Also, since some large campuses may have electronic mail
patrons that number in the thousands it would be impractical to
distribute desktop software on floppy diskettes; it must reside in a
server at the top of the electronic mail network and be easily
transferable to the desktop via the network.

The basic human interface should conform to current standards for
pull-down windows, but the implementation should also operate on
standard monochrome character-based displays of the original IBM PC and
clones, as well as on Apple Macintoshes, some of which will be around
for years to come. It would also be nice if minor details like arrow
keys could be supported instead of forcing each user to go on a search
mission to discover what combination of keys moves thecursor around the
screen. Further, too many "state of the art" electronic mail systems
require high-resolution color graphics and the latest top-of-the-line
desktop computer configurations to function properly. While it is now
reasonable to assume that a majority of the campus desktop workstations
associated with an electronic mail system will include a hard disk for
software storage, the software should still operate from a single floppy
diskette.

Speaking of those pull-down windows, our ideal electronic mail
system should also allow the selection of message recipients by
highlighting individual names within an appropriate window. Of course,
existing technology could allow for "wild-card" selection of names from
any piece of the name, and phonetic interpretive routines might even be
employed. The same technique could be used to browse the campus
directory by department, building, or even by first name.

A separate but similar windowing technique could be used to select
external networks and nodes within those networks. While the current
procedures for accessing directories from external nodes are still
primitive, friendlier methods for that feature should be in the queue
for development within each major network.

Even though most desktop computers include word processing
capabilities, and some campuses even try to enforce the use of a single
standard package, a rudimentary text editor should be supplied (to
operate within yet another window) to prepare short messages in standard
ASCII text files. While most word processing packages provide for flat
ASCII file output, the extra steps required are hardly worth the effort
for a short message, and the line-editors common to most mainframe
electronic mail software are even less acceptable.

Finally, there are several additional desirable features for the
ideal electronic mail system. Almost all of these features are present
in some of the current systems, but few have them all.

While some systems do provide a "return receipt requested" feature,
the time and date the recipient had access to the message (at least
within the local network) should be recorded in the central electronic
mail server. Notice the term "had access" is used instead of "read"; the
former does not imply the latter. Further, it should be possible for the
sender to retrieve any message as yet not accessed by a recipient.

It should also be possible to attach standard files of all types
(text, spreadsheet, graphic, and so forth) to messages and have them
passed through the networks in a manner known in the current technical
jargon as "transparent to the user." Since the identification on these
files is known, they should be so identified within the system in
"human-readable" as well as "machine-processable" ways rather than
requiring a separate message saying: "That file named BUDGET.WKR
attached to my last message is in my WILLY spreadsheet format. I hope
you can read it." Many current electronic mail systems do provide an
impressive list of transferable file types, then the exceptions crop up
at implementation time and, of course, the exception is always the file-
type you would most like to transmit. Few casual electronic mail users
are prepared to create intermediate file formats for transfer, or to
then transform those intermediate file formats into the appropriate
desktop software package after receipt.

While there are many important technical issues central to electronic
mail both within and between colleges and universities, those issues
will be resolved in appropriate forums. The perspective of this
viewpoint is entirely that of a human user. When electronic mail becomes
as easy to use as the telephone, it will take its place as one more
convenient communication technique alongside the venerable voice system
and the upstart FAX machine.

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