Before the dawn of electronic communication, written exchanges were mostly done by letter.  These letters were delivered through a post office.

With the dawn of e-mail letters delivered via postal service were given the descriptive nickname of snail mail.  From the time a letter was sent until the reciept of a reply could be weeks, even months.

Today of course, your reply times can be measured in minutes some times even seconds if you use email or instant messaging.

Changing Etiquette

At the high school I attended letter writing was a mandatory course. Here we learned the standard rules for layout, design, syntax, content types, greetings , salutations and so on.

While there may be keyboarding courses at most high schools these days when to use e-mail, how to construct the messages and associated protocols are mainly just skills you are supposed to just pick up.

Misuse of the Medium

Given the ease and speed of the medium e-mail is often misused to have a conversation.  Real caution needs to be exercised around this as conversations without visual queues have a high risk of fostering misunderstanding, even offending.

I had a recent interesting example of this when crafting an e-mail to my sister.  The topic was in response to a question/ suggestion she had made to me  and I was answering on behalf  of all the parties, which included my adult children.

Before sending the reply to my sister I sent an e-mail to my children for feedback.  Without exception they all said I was too harsh.  Great and helpful feedback which resulted in a revised response.

For me this highlighted the risks of e-mail communication.  Without the perspective from my children I could have sent my sister a very wrong message.