Email Wins The Game
Anyone in my position gets lots of mail, and since I’ve been publishing my electronic mail addresses for a decade, I get lots of E-mail as well. The ones I dread are not the ones that wonder if my parents were married. They are the ones with something along the lines of G=Joe/S-Bloggs/ O=Clueless/A=slowmail/C= us in the header.
The X.400 markers are a sure sign that it will take longer to write the address correctly than to answer the letter, and that the chances of it getting through are so slim that I might as well not bother.
One of the reasons for Internet E-mail’s popularity is that so many useful addresses are relatively easy to remember. Once you have been told that Barack Obama is [email protected] gov there’s no reason why you should ever forget it.
Well, perhaps that’s not a very useful address, but it is shorter, simpler and more memorable than the X.400 or even the snail-mail equivalent. And because of the Internet’s fast-growing popularity, X.400 addressing is doomed, as Jim Carroll explained in the last EEMA (European Electronic Messaging Association) Briefing.
X.400 networks won’t simply cease to exist, but they
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