How many email messages were waiting for you when you logged on today? I'll hazarda guess and suggest that it would have been somewhat more than one!A report from the Jupiter organisation estimates that commercial e-mail spending willgrow from $164 million in 1999 to $7.3 billion in 2005 - this represents an estimatedforty-fold increase in e-mail volume.It's also estimated that the average number of commercial e-mail messages that USonline consumers receive per year will increase from 40 in 1999 to over 1,600 in 2005;non-marketing and personal correspondence will more than double from approximately1,750 in 1999 to almost 4,000 in 2005. So it's no exaggeration to say that one of the fastest growing methods ofcommunication is email. In fact, we're in the middle of a communications revolutionand it's ironic that we're once again relying on one of the earliest forms of masscommunication - the written word.Language is a dynamic, living thing and in the past, has been able to keep pace withchanges; so, when electricity was invented (or discovered - depending on your view ofthe world), it was given a name which comes from elektron the Greek word for "amber"and electrum, the Latin word for "amber" - the alloy of gold and silver. In the mid 1600sit was known that rubbing amber or glass would produce a magnetic effect thatattracted light weight materials, threads, dust etc and this was the only known use forelectricity for many years - until that fellow with the kite came along!The first big break-through in rapid mass communication, the telegraph, takes its namefrom two Greek words: tele meaning "far off" and graphein "to write, draw or representby lines". Television is a mix of the Greek tele and Latin visus, past participle of the verb "tosee". Computers were given a name which is derived from the Latin computatio - areckoning, because in the early days, that's all they did.But, as with many phenomena which have burst onto the scene in the last decade, theWorld Wide Web has outstripped our store of words. We've grabbed at a stop-gapsolution and come up with the prefix "E" to describe anything to do with the Internet,so there's e-commerce, e-books and e-mail. Since e-mail is here to stay, now is the time to come up with some sensible terms todescribe it - let's start
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