Improve Your Email Style

By: Gurpiyar Singh

The integration of mobile phones into social life is still in its infancy in most parts of the world, triggering a set of socio cultural convulsions as institutions, people and places adapt to and regulate its use. As is typical with technologies that alter patterns of social life, the mobile phone has been subjected to onslaught of criticism for the ways in which it disrupts existing norms of propriety and social boundaries. While celebrated as a technology that liberates users from the constraints of place and time, it has equally been reviled as a technology that disrupts the integrity of places and fact-to-face social encounters.

"Even a silent mobile can make its presence felt as though it was an addition to a social group, and … many people feel that just the knowledge that a call might intervene tends to divert attention from those present at the time".

Mobile messaging has been prevalent among the youth population since nineties, when pagers were adopted as a way of sending text messages among high school and college students. By the mid nineties, different variants of mobile phones began to replace pagers in the youth and general populations. In addition to telephony these phones had the ability to send short text messages between mobile phone handsets. With the advent of Internet, users were able to send longer messages regardless of phone type or service provider. All of these technical developments have supported the rapid spread of mobile email among the youth population.

We use the term mobile email to refer to all types of textual and pictorial transmission via mobile phones. This includes what Japanese refer to as "short mail" and Europeans refer to as "short text messages", as well as the wider variety enabled by the mobile Internet. Even as mobile phones have become common in all age groups, however, the younger demographic has a higher volume and unique pattern of usage that differentiate them from older users. At average students pay more than the general mobile using population. Secondly, the growing mobile work force across the world have a greater need to mobile email access so as to remain connected with information at all times, at all places.

The proliferation of mobile devices and the increased demand for mobile email among "on the go professionals" provides easy web browsing and email capabilities, producing user-friendly email experiences mirroring traditional computers. Mobile emails enable the user to receive and send emails via their mobile phones and view text, pdf, picture and sound attachments thereby enhancing the overall work potential, efficiency and productivity of the mobile professional. It also enables the management to improvise the flow of information and ability to control mobile workforce with greater effectiveness.