Usability, Affordability, and Ubiquity of Email Cannot Term Paper

usability, affordability, and ubiquity of email cannot be denied. However, along with these benefits come some significant issues that companies must be aware of and try to address. Information overflow, misuse that replaces more appropriate forms of communication, amplified security exposure, right to privacy concerns, and negative implications for work practices represent the dark side of email

Email extensions such as alias and distribution lists combined with the near zero costs allow irresponsible mass mailings. Spamming is now a common marketing technique that has become even more problematic than unwanted telemarketing. Email leads to an in-flow of information that is beyond most employees' bandwidth. Most modern email facilities have weak content filtering and message prioritization and many companies do not permit the creation of private mailboxes whose address is controlled by the owner.

Nearly all systems lack the ability to deal with hierarchical organizations that correspond to the organization's usual communication paths or the ability to impose a charge to users that send email.

Email is frequently misused to replace more appropriate organizational information routes, most notably face-to-face communications. Author M. Lynn Markus in Finding a Happy Medium: Explaining the Negative Effects of Electronic Communication of Social Life at Work provides a case study of a large company dubbed "HCP" and found that people were "hiding behind the network." That is, they were using corporate email when they wanted to convey a non-negotiable decision, when they did not like the other person, when they wanted to describe a situation that made them angry, or when they wanted to make a request of someone that irritates them.

Security problems created by email are a huge drain on corporate resources. Email clients support binary, executable files as attachments. These files can transmit viruses that corrupt computer systems and that…