Pushing the envelope

What’s so good about email? Well, it’s quick and easy for you to write an email, you can copy in lots of people, it’s immediate and it’s free.

And the worst thing about email? Well, it’s very quick and easy for other people to send you an email, or to copy you in on an email, and their bloody senseless email arrives immediately. And for bloody free.

This is one problem. Almost all the advantages of email accrue to the sender. The effort, obligation and responsibility all fall to the recipient. In that sense email creates what economists call ‘negative externalities’, rather like industrial pollution or aircraft noise.

In several respects email is worse than conventional paper mail. Letters come in a batch, once a day. They don’t follow you around the world while you are on holiday.

But there is another, less obvious virtue to postal mail. From the outside alone, at a single glance, it is easy to sift and categorise each item. Is the envelope brown or white? Is the address handwritten? Does it have a stamp? First class, second class or bulk? Is it a postcard or a screed? Is it a magazine, catalogue or newsletter? It’s usually obvious.

With a cursory scan, I can categorise the contents of my letterbox. Bills go in a disused toastrack, where I batch-process them in a burst once every ten days or so. Invitations go on a shelf, as do postcards. Catalogues or advertising mail go to the bin or to the loo, where I can read them later. Magazines go next to the sofa.

Each item can thus be read at a time (and in a mood and posture) appropriate to its contents. For bills I sit at the table with a pen and a chequebook; for magazines I sprawl on the sofa in the posture of the 12th man in an Edwardian cricket photograph.