Mail

If it seems as if we never talk anymore at work, it's because we probably don't. At least for work purposes, according to a query of business executives who say their communications is almost strictly confined to e-mail these days. The telephone is a distant third when it comes to how we communicate at work, with only 13 percent listing it as the method used most often. Five years ago, the phone was used the most by 48 percent of executives. E-mail was the prime means for only 27 percent then.

I often go back over an e-mail to correct spelling or grammar. Sometimes I change a phrase. Not always -- but enough times to drive me crazy -- AOL will step in when I tap the "send" and say, "This has been revised. Do you want to save it as a text file?" I can answer yes or no. I tried no the first dozen times, and AOL cut me off and the e-mail disappeared into space. So I tried yes, and the same thing happened.I guess that this is what you get for taking time to get your e-mail just right in our supercharged world of information overload.

WHEN I LEFT work last night, my business e-mail in-box was empty. When I logged in from home three hours later to start this column, there were eight messages -- six of them spam. My favorite bore the salutation: "`Lose that gut and fat butt." Like I don't get enough of that from my family. For yucks, I checked my AOL mail. In the three days since I'd last logged on, 51 messages had accumulated -- all spam. Surfing over to my Yahoo mail account, I found 49 new messages. All but six were spam, and of those, three were messages I'd sent to myself for backup purposes.

By all accounts, Bob Morse is a solid citizen who runs a small wedding video and Web design business in northern California. So why did he send an e-mail peddling hard-core Russian pornography to Francis Uy at the Johns Hopkins University? The short answer: He didn't know he'd done it. For Uy, who works at Hopkins' Center for Talented Youth, the Russian porn offer was just one of 77 junk messages that landed in his home and office inboxes that day. From all that garbage, he had to fish out 16 e-mails that were actually for him. Both men were victims of an assault that has turned the Internet into a war zone - a contest of wills between spammers and those who would stop them.

THIS ALL STARTED with a maudlin poem about the dangers of drunken driving, the type of prosaic thing that too frequently appears in our e-mailboxes, sent by someone who loves to strike the "forward" button and share their literary discoveries with everyone in their address book. If you get e-mail, you've probably received such poems and other efforts at the written word, introduced with exclamations such as: "This says it all!" It is a mild annoyance. But I believe it's why God and Bill Gates invented the "delete" key. Others have a different, more overwrought response.

From the mailbag ... Several readers responded to a recent column that warned against sending pro- or anti-candidate e-mails at work, and it seems that some federal workers are avoiding on-the-job political speech of any kind. But Brian Shuy, a former U.S. Department of Education employee from Olney, asked whether there was a policy on wearing clothing that could be "remotely seen as political." "I remember wearing a tie that had elephants on it with their trunks down, which is the opposite of the Republican Party logo.

Joey Chuasiriporn got a bonus in his Web-based e-mail this month: 25 times more space. His free Yahoo Inc. inbox had jumped from about 4 megabytes to 100 megabytes, enough to hold 50,000 pages of text. "I was really surprised," said the 27-year-old from Timonium. He wasn't sure he liked the e-mail's new look at first, but welcomed the fact he wouldn't have to delete old messages as quickly. "I'm going to probably keep more pictures, that's the one thing I'm definitely going to do with the newfound space," said Chuasiriporn, a professional golfer like his sister, Jenny Chuasiriporn.

WASHINGTON - When women in long dresses and men in black ties ambled to the post office in days of old, they sometimes found their letters with holes whacked through them or their envelopes browned from smoke or covered in the peculiar smell of some nasty chemical. Far from angry, the patrons were relieved. To them, it meant the mail had been sanitized. The emergence of anthrax is the most serious challenge ever to the U.S. Postal Service, but history is replete with all kinds of attacks on the mail - and efforts to rid the system of biological threats go back decades, even centuries.

WHEN AMERICA Online sued for exclusive use of its e-mail slogan, it was lucky the case was tossed out by a federal judge and not an English teacher. Otherwise, AOL might have been sentenced to hours of banging erasers.As the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan movie about a cyber-relationship, "You've Got Mail," became a hit, AOL sued to halt AT&T from telling its e-mail users, "You have mail."That's because AOL subscribers who receive electronic mail are alerted by a computer voice that chirps "You've got mail" as the words "You have mail" appear on the screen.

A former TWA cargo worker who loaded planes carrying mail from Baltimore to Hawaii received a six-month sentence yesterday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore for possessing stolen mail. Peter Bamidele Adeyemi, 46, of Hyattsville, a former baggage handler at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Frederic N. Smalkin, who recommended that the term be served in a halfway house, prosecutors said. Adeyemi, also known as Peter James, pleaded guilty in May to possession of stolen mail.