You won’t find the Devil listed on MCI’s electronic mail network. But you’ll find “God,” William F. Buckley, Jr., musician Peter Nero, IBM, other Fortune 500 companies, me, and at least one hundred thousand more subscribers, including a Western Union official who’s keeping up with the competition.

“God” is a man in Morgantown, West Virginia, and his listing popped up when, out of curiosity, I typed “God” after MCI’s “To:” prompt.

I don’t know if “God” is a preacher or a businessman whose company has a distinctive name or initials. I’m happy to see him registered with MCI, however. When I went looking for “God” earlier on the net, the computer said in its literal way, “God not found. Enter a postal address or TLX (Telex address).”

I still can’t scare up “Satan,” at least electronically; but MCI’s reply to my last “God” entry showed both the breadth and versatility that MCI and other systems may acquire if E-Mail boosters are right. The devil actually may be on MCI any day now. Several hundred thousand Americans are hooked up to one mail net or another, and more than five million should be tapping out messages that way by the end of the decade. In Virginia a financial planner has used E-Mail’s speed to save a $300,000 deal threatened by a legal deadline.

With E-Mail you can:

● Send messages computer to computer within an office or around the world. At their convenience recipients can flash messages across their screens or print them out.

● Use a computer to zip messages to special centers near recipients. The centers print the messages, then deliver them by courier or local mail. That’s how you can overcome one of the original drawbacks of electronic mail—the other person’s lacking a computer on the same network.

● Send and receive messages via the Telex network—which, of course, is why MCI Mail politely asked for “God’s” Telex number.

“E-Mail can be nothing more than the computer equivalent of a telephone-answering box ... storing messages for people to read when they have a chance,” says Steve Caswell, a consultant who edits Electronic Mail & Micro Systems, a leading industry newsletter.

“At its most complex level, it’s a very intelligent ultimate communications device.”

Electronic mail’s roots are in the telegraph, Western Union telegrams, and Telex machines. Computerized E-Mail has sprung up in the past two decades; it grew in the military and academic communities and spread to government agencies and high-tech companies like Texas Instruments. Within the past few years, thousands of home users and other businesses have jumped in.

Competition is keen. The Western Union man is on MCI because he wants to see how it stacks up against his company’s own E-Mail operation, EasyLink. GTE Corporation and International Telephone and Telegraph offer E-Mail service. So does The Source, which lets companies set up their own E-Mail networks without investing in giant computers. Instead, they piggyback on The Source’s computer bank in the Washington, D.C., area. Users can dump messages into The Source’s computers over phone lines or log in to see what messages await them.

Anchor Financial Services, in Phoenix, Arizona, used The Source to rig up a network it hoped would lead to well over $1 million in annual commissions. One hundred financial planners were on line, and Don De Young, senior marketing vice-president, expected some fifteen hundred by 1985. They’d be able to place mutual-fund orders for clients, conduct other transactions like placing insurance and annuity orders, and pick the brains of Anchor’s financial experts.

One planner, Joe Schopen of Norfolk, Virginia, already has used Anchor’s E-Mail to save a $300,000 cable TV-related deal. Ten investors wanted a tax break, available only if a Virginia agency approved their partnership documents before the end of the year. At the last minute, Schopen learned of additions that would be required; E-Mail gave him the speedy delivery that he needed for the investors to sign the legal papers in time.

“Without electronic mail,” he says, “we very likely would have lost those sales.

“I’ve heard we’re getting a 10 percent increase in productivity because of our faster turnaround and because our clients can electronically learn when other people receive messages for them.”

Some other advantages of E-Mail are:

1. Lower phone bills. In a Midwestern office of the H. J. Heinz Company, a secretary says the CompuServe network had cut her phone time by 80 percent. Using electronic mail, for instance, Sue Clark can send a memo to dozens of offices at once.

2. Elimination of telephone tag. “We can type a memo at the end of our workday and have a response [from the West Coast] by the next morning,” says Philip Selden, an Ohio-based executive with Owens-Illinois Inc., who is using Western Union’s EasyLink service.

3. An end to garbled messages. Errors and misunderstandings decline when people can write electronic messages.

4. More efficient sharing of ideas. Computer conferencing is an example. A group of people with similar interests can keep a running record of their electronic conversations.

Say you’re an oil company with dozens or hundreds of offshore rigs. How to share ideas on efficiency, safety, other related topics? Well, via radio-telephone link in some cases, your rig people might log onto an electronic network. There they might read and add to the remarks left by other people in this ongoing conversation.^[76]

Now let’s say somebody wanted to “speak” to only one other person on the network. He could do it.

Likewise, he might form a subgroup—say, one of people interested in helicopter safety.

E-Mail also is a boon to travelers using portable computers. Peter Nero says that while on the road, he often must reply quickly to proposals for concert appearances. So he taps out letters in midflight on a lap-sized Radio Shack computer, then zips them over hotel phone lines to his office. In Los Angeles a machine prints them for his secretary to mail.

There are other virtues of E-Mail—MCI can even arrange to print letters on your letterhead. A ten-year-old drew his own Bucky Beaver logo for letters to Grandma, and a Chicago bank follows up with laser-printed letters to impress the millionaires its sales reps call on.

E-Mail also can add new wrinkles to old friendships, business and private. Two and one-half decades ago, an elementary-school pal named Geoff Fobes moved to India with his parents, and we started scrawling letters; I even fooled myself into thinking I could learn Hindi from a book he mailed. Not long ago I introduced Geoff—by now in North Carolina—to MCI Mail. “Well,” he typed, “it seemed only karmically fitting to be writing you first. Many glorious surprises when your letter began to appear. My father was dazed and said this was a historic moment. Seems melodramatic, but then he is an old State Department manual typewriter man.”

Electronic mail, of course, also has its negatives. Take Nero. He might have used direct phone hookups to his office computers many times, or perhaps other networks; but as of spring 1984 he was far from a regular on the MCI network. Months after I “mailed” a message to him, I hadn’t gotten an electronic receipt confirming that he had read my “letter.” And I’m still waiting for “God” to reply. As of early 1984, MCI had picked up sixty-five thousand of its subscribers from the Dow Jones News Retrieval Service and the Bibliographic Retrieval Service. And many had not logged on even once. Some registrants—including “God”?—didn’t even know the E-Mail service existed.

So MCI was flooding subscribers’ mailboxes—the paper kind—with brochures telling them of IBM PCs and other goodies awaiting people if they signed on electronically to enter drawings. “God” theoretically might have won “a luxury vacation in Hawaii.”

“Since the programs were announced,” said the Wall Street Journal, “weekly [electronic] volume has risen 20 percent.” MCI in late 1984 boasted 150,000 subscribers.

By now it may have another feature. Pay extra and a computer will ring you up and read you your message. And eventually—maybe even right now—you’ll be able to pay bills and see your bank balance via the network.

Still, fearing loss of privacy, some people won’t use MCI Mail and similar services.

“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.

Glitches and all, MCI still works out for budget-minded writers and consultants. A “mailbox” is just $18 a year, and if you can dial up MCI locally as people in most large cities can, you pay a mere $1 to send 1,000 words computer-to-computer in the U.S.—including Hawaii. Indeed, Jim Fallows says he and some other Atlantic Monthly writers routinely use the service for trying articles out on each other.

In addition, MCI offers some neat little wrinkles for heavy-duty corporate users. Companies with in-house systems can set up bridges between the MCI and their existing electronic mail nets. As the MCI bragged in its on-line newsletter, you can simultaneously “send a company-wide memo electronically on your internal system; copy your attorneys, who subscribe to MCI Mail; copy your vendors with laser-printed, first-class letters,” and “deliver the boss’s copy the same day at his conference in Dallas.” If the boss is in London, a letter written on your computer can reach him by courier after a machine prints it out. What’s more, for a fraction of the cost of Telexes, you can directly reach business associates’ computers in England or a number of other countries.

Of course, especially if you’re a business, do look at the other E-Mail networks, too. I’ve written much here about MCI simply because it is one of the largest networks and I’m most familiar with it.

All the E-Mail services, at any rate, offer the same advantages over conventional letters: speed. Even skeptics see the potential. Peter Ross Range, the man with the WordStar-MCI woes, says, “I want the day to come soon when I won’t have to lick another stamp.”

Some of the most useful electronic mail can go from personperson to another in the same building or complex—a capability made possible through local networking, discussed in the next chapter.