Advantages of E-mail
E-mail is the most widely used medium of electronic communication. People use e-mail not only for business purposes but also for social ad personal affairs. The rate of using e-mail is increasing day by day across the world. The reasons for its growing popularity are discussed below:
- Time saving: E-mail is a highly fast method of exchanging information. Through e-mail, people can transmit message within minutes. As a result, both sender and receiver can save their time. The managers of ‘Digital Equipment Corporation’ indicate that they save about seven hours per week because their electronic mail system has increased the speed of decision making.
- Communicating large volume of information: People can send large volume of information with the help of e-mail. Through e-mail, one can attach writings of hundred pages easily.
- Preservation of message: E-mail message is automatically stored in the recipient’s computer until he\she reads the message. This allows the recipient to read the message at his convenient time.
- Quick decision making: E-mail helps to make quick decision. Since e-mail allows people to exchange information very quickly, they can take quick decision.
- Cost saving: E-mail is cheap in nature. It takes only a fractional amount of the cost of posting a letter.
- Communicating with unavailable people: Another important advantage of e-mail is that it provides the opportunity of sending message even when the receiver is not available. Because, the message will be stored I the receiver’s computer.
- Flexibility: It provides flexibility in communication. A message can be sent to more than one person at a time only by changing receiver’s address.
- Overcoming the time and distant barriers: E-mail provides the opportunity of sending messages to distant people. Through e-mail, one can send messages at anywhere in the world very quickly. Thus, e-mail overcomes the time and distance barriers.
- Maintaining secrecy: E-mail message can be kept secret with the help of password. No one other than the user of e-mail can open and read it.
Disadvantages of E-mail
Although e-mail has become a well accepted and recognizes method of communication in modern time, it is not at all free from limitations. Some of its limitations are as follows:
- Absence of nonverbal cues: E-mail cannot show non-verbal cues like facial expression and other body movements of the persons involved in communication. Therefore, E-mail messages that may fail to draw due attention of the receiver.
- Excessive messages: Due to ease of sending messages electronically, people generally send a lot of messages that may not always draw the attention of the receivers.
- Difficult to convey emotions and feelings: E-mail does not communicate visually the sender’s emotions and feelings. In the same way, the receiver also fails to show his/her attitudes and reactions.
- Possibility of overlooking the messages: E-mail may be overlooked by the receiver. The receiver may not read some messages due to busyness or excessive messages.
- Difficult to detect errors: E-mail messages do not show spelling and grammatical mistakes. Therefore, the sender may fail to detect errors in the message. This may create bad impression in the mind of the reader about the sender.
