“Electronic mail,” said my literary agent, Berenice Hoffman, ever vigilant about her clients’ privacy, “is for letters addressed ‘Occupant.‘”
Perhaps for this very reason, MCI Mail’s bills don’t list the recipients of messages unless you want. In that limited sense MCI is more private than the telephone system.
You shouldn’t use E-Mail for confidential correspondence, however, if you can’t protect your message with electronic scrambling.
Ian (“Captain Zap”) Murphy, whom MCI Mail lists under his real name, really bought that point home. “Any easy way to get into MCI’s operating system?” he asked.
“Come on, Ian,” I said. “Let’s not court temptation. That would be like giving an alcoholic a bottle of Jack Daniels.” We joked over it. He said those days were behind him. And yet I wondered whether, even now, hackers were unraveling the security of the MCI net.
E-Mail had and has other drawbacks. High-tech intimidates some executives; others see typing as a threat to the executive image.
Then there are technical glitches. Gil Gordon, the telecommuting consultant, gave up MCI Mail in disgust because for some strange reason he had trouble getting his micro to show new lines on the screen properly when he was typing letters.
Also, even though MCI ballyhoos itself as a link between many kinds of machines, you normally can’t underline something on your Xerox 860, say, and have it show up right on someone’s IBM running Perfect Writer. MCI strips the special characters for underlining, boldfacing, and several other typographical trimmings. (Among word processors, there are no such standard codes for such features.)
“MCI’s using us as guinea pigs,” complained Peter Ross Range, a Washington writer whose double-spaced letters were turning single-spaced when MCI printed them. That happened with WordStar, the popular word processor. MCI put out a detailed explanation of how to avoid such problems, and I passed on the basics to Peter, who said, “What’s the point if it takes that long and I can just call a messenger from an express service?” Peter also found that on some days MCI Mail just wouldn’t work at times; I myself noticed that, too. And some people’s $2 MCI letters, passed on to the U.S. Postal Service for delivery as “hard copy,” were taking several days to arrive. Still other MCI messages, hard copy or electronic, never reached their destinations at any time. Service to New York seemed the worst but was better to medium-sized cities, especially in the Midwest. Those are all issues crucial to business.
MCI Mail dates back only to late 1983, and by now maybe things are much better. Perhaps software makers and MCI and rivals will cooperate in a big way someday so that you routinely can get boldfacing and other “luxuries” if you stick the right command in your electronic file.