E Mail Messages

I sent my son an e-mail a couple of days ago with directions to a family gathering in Philadelphia. When I didn't get a response, I called his college dorm room to find out whether he'd received it.It turned out he'd been busy. He's a student computer aide, and his mailbox was so jammed with messages that he'd missed mine."It's this Melissa virus thing," he complained."Were that many people infected?" I asked."No, I don't know anybody who's infected," he said, "but everybody's worried about it."

iPhone checks e-mail, surfs Web with compact deviceIf you don't think the Internet appliance has arrived yet, you don't have an InfoGear iPhone ($299) on your desk. This desktop phone, with a built-in, 7.4-inch monochrome LED touch screen and pull-out QWERTY keyboard, allows you to access up to four e-mail accounts and surf the Web.The iPhone out-of-box experience couldn't be more satisfying. You take it out of the box, plug it into the wall and your phone line, choose which Internet service plan you want, enter credit card and user information and you're ready to surf.

SAN DIEGO -- America Online Inc., the No. 1 online service, filed another lawsuit yesterday to stop its customers from being flooded with millions of unsolicited pieces of "junk" e-mail.The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Diego against Michael Persaud, claims that he committed fraud by using various names to send millions of e-mail messages to America Online customers. Those messages solicit money in exchange for a directory of companies that offer home employment.The lawsuit is one of nine filed by AOL in five states against people who send out "spam," a term for unwanted electronic mail.

It doesn't take an expensive poll or an exhaustive round of phone calls for Joe DiGiacinto to check the mood of the Maryland electorate. All he has to do is switch on his computer.Every few hours, between other chores, the office manager at Ellen R. Sauerbrey's campaign sits down at the keyboard in his cubbyhole. He quickly sorts through the latest batch of e-mail messages -- compliments and criticisms, policy questions and personal gripes, requests for lawn signs and for help with school projects.

Most of Jimmy and Bonnie Nolen's two-year search for the perfect home was decidedly low-tech.But after reading stacks of Cecil County home-shopping pamphlets and driving to look at dozens of houses, their homebuying unexpectedly took a high-tech turn onto the "information superhighway" last fall.A few weeks after Jimmy Nolen, a ship's captain with the U.S. Merchant Marine, left home on a four-month assignment at sea, Bonnie Nolen found the house they'd been seeking.It is a 6,000-square-foot contemporary home with high ceilings and angles and curves that look like "a little gray castle," said Mrs. Nolen, 51.The house has three fireplaces, five bedrooms, an in-law suite and a floor plan that is open and spacious.

Do you think of pagers as "those little buzzing, beeping boxes" that let you know who called?That was your father's pager.Pagers have gone literate. They bring not just phone numbers, but words - lots and lots of words. The new pagers are "alphanumeric," and the words they receive can be dictated to a phone operator or sent as e-mail from most Internet-connected computers. A few of the latest pagers carry voice.Pagers have also gone two-way. Before they could only receive. Now some can also send numbers and words back.

BIG Brother is watching you! Especially if you're at work reading this article online on your employer's computer.Companies are installing new computer systems for their employees and opening up a whole new world of Internet and e-mail usage.Some experts predict that by the year 2000, 40 million computers users will send 60 billion e-mail messages each year. Many of these people access the Internet in connection with their work.Most employees using this new technology are probably unaware that their employers have the capacity to monitor and read their e-mail messages.

SHERRY IS JUST 13, but she is dating a much older guy who is pressuring her to have sex. Nadine is the same age and she's already had sex, but she was too drunk to remember it, and now she has an STD.Dhani is doing drugs, and a couple of his friends might be gay. Bobby's parents are divorced, and his mother's ex-con boyfriend is roughing her up. Tasha is 13, too, incredibly hip and very wise, but she's already given up on her future.Meet your child's new friends. Nervous yet?These kids all "attend" Edgar Allan Poe Middle School, an authentic mix of reality and virtual reality.

LENOIR, N.C. -- Sharon Rena Lopatka, who was strangled after traveling from her Hampstead home to this small mill town, came with the intention of being sexually tortured and killed by a man she met over the Internet, police here say.Lopatka left a letter for her husband before taking a train from Baltimore to Charlotte on Oct. 13, according to a search warrant request released by the sheriff's department yesterday.In the letter, Lopatka said she would not return and asked her husband "not to go after the one who did this to her," according to the request.

Politicians, a citizens group and a member of the county Planning Commission are questioning whether commissioners violated the state's Open Meetings Act by using electronic mail to informally discuss a proposed subdivision.The incident -- which involved four of the seven commissioners and took place over a period of several days in February -- has prompted a request by Del. Joseph M. Getty for a ruling from the state attorney general's office."There was an analysis by one commissioner sent to a quorum on e-mail," Mr. Getty, a Carroll Republican, said yesterday.