MORE EMAIL ACCOUNTS THAN PHONES IN 2 YEARS

"What has taken the telephone industry 125 years to do and what has taken television 50 years to do, e-mail will have done in 20 years," says Messaging Online editor Eric Arnum.

By the end of the year, the survey said, 569 million accounts were in use worldwide, 40 percent of them in the US; two-thirds of the US workforce was using e-mail; one out of four families had at least one e-mail account with a per-household average of four.

"E-mail is the killer app," said Arnum. "It is absolutely shocking to me to see how quickly things like delivery of statements and bills, electronic checks and electronic transfers are coming into e-mail."

Outside the US, e-mail is still in its early stages of development, despite 1999 growth that exceeded 100 percent. Mailboxes in the rest of the world more than doubled from 117 million at the end of 1998 to 236 million a year later, as the use of e-mail spreads into both the corporate market and into households across Europe, Australia, and lately, into Latin America.

The telephone and TV will not fade into history, Arnum said, but e-mail rapidly graduated into the mass media category. "It's gone from being a tech dweeb's or geek's toy," he said. "It deserves to be counted alongside TV, radio and telephone, even the post office."

And the down side of e-mail?

"Sometimes," Arnum said, "people type faster than they think, but they believe that these messages are sort of transcient. It's a substitute for conversation when actually it's a written communication that can be used forever. People have to understand that e-mail is forever."

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