Overview

For most of the online population the internet arguably has had its major impact through electronic messaging (in particular email) rather than graphic-rich Flash-infested web sites, downloading feature films or online retailing. This profile points to resources regarding internet and associated messaging systems: email, IM, chat, SMS and MMS.

It covers some technical aspects of messaging and highlights academic and market studies. It also points to writing about online communities, bulletin boards and newsgroups.

     content of this profile

The following pages cover -

• issues - cultural and regulatory issues, including spam, defamation, copyright, privacy and hoaxes
• Email - technical primers and developments such as ENUM and Rich Media
• Webmail -
• SMS - writing about Short Message Services (SMS), including pointers to use of SMS for advertising and claims that it has underpinned 'people power' in some emerging economies
• MMS - Multimedia Messaging Services
• IM - proprietary Instant Messaging (IM) services
• chat - IRC and other chat
• community - netiquette, flaming, moderation and commoditization of 'communities'
• news - impact and management of email news services and newsgroups
• message traffic - data about the volume and use (or abuse) of email and SMS, with benchmarks from the postal systems and voice traffic
• content - regulating the use of messaging systems
• evidence - and enforcement
• disclaimers and signatures - debate about boilerplate at the end of email messages
• managing - hints about managing identity and the message environment

     related pages

This profile complements other documentation on this site. There is a separate page on Spam - looking at statistics, economics, activist groups and legislation - as part of the Security & InfoCrime Guide, with a detailed profile on regulation of spam in Australia and New Zealand.

There is also a profile on web logs (blogs) - an electronic publishing genre that combines the ease of email and the potentially global exposure of web pages - and on social spaces and 'virtual worlds' such as MUDs and MOOs.

     background

For a general introduction we recommend Jacob Palme's Electronic Mail (Norwood: Artech House 1995) and his more self-congratulatory paper The Future of Email. Andrew Odlyzko's characteristically perceptive 2001 paper Content is Not King and 2003 paper The Many Paradoxes of Broadband suggest that connectivity - in particular email - is the 'killer app' until a new infrastructure and improved pricing allows large-scale access to rich media applications such as Video on Demand.




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