Even though they have not celebrated their 30th anniversary yet, e-mails have already become an absolutely indispensable means of communication for many companies. The advantages are obvious: it is a matter of seconds to send an e-mail off, documents can be attached easily, and the addressees can decide themselves when they want to answer or attend to the inquiry. Nowadays there is hardly a company that can afford to do without electronic mail. Given this fact, it is quite surprising that official studies about this topic are rather hard to find.

Now, this shortcoming has been remedied to some extent by the latest survey commissioned by the German BITKOM association (German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media). It shows that e-mails have become firmly established in the internal and external communication of many companies. 92 per cent of e-mail users confirmed that they could not do without it at work. Those polled stated that they checked their e-mail accounts several times a day. That way, the average employee reads up to 20 in-coming mails a day.

However, this current poll rendered very contradictory results concerning the efficiency of e-mails. The majority said that using e-mail did not increase their personal working capacity (63 per cent). In a survey from 2002, the percentage of those who thought that this was the case was considerably higher (70 per cent). It seems as if the euphoria of previous years is gradually decreasing and giving way to a more realistic evaluation of this medium. Future studies will have to clarify whether this is due to the increasing number of spam or the plain realization that some things can be dealt with more easily in a personal conversation.

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