Electronic Mail

Once the province of the technologically elite, electronic communications are now proliferating throughout the work force, but the expectations of companies and their employees about privacy are sometimes divergent. A local example underscores the potential problem. Three employees of Epson America in Torrance filed a suit against the company for violating their privacy rights with regard to electronic mail. (One plaintiff's allegation has since been dismissed.

ROME -- Pope Benedict XVI sent his first tweet in Latin on Sunday, backed by experts who argue that the dead language is ideal for the 21st-century medium of Twitter. In his debut Latin tweet, the pontiff said God asked believers to "orare semper, iustitiam factitare, amare probitatem, humiles Secum ambulare," which translates to "pray constantly, do justice, love goodness and walk humbly with Him," a passage from the Book of Micah. According to Benedict's welcome message on his Latin Twitter account at @Pontifex_ln, "Twitter" in Latin is "Pagina publica breviloquentis," or "Concise, public page.

"As to ZapMail," Federal Express Chairman Frederick W. Smith told an interviewer in the current issue of Inc. magazine, "as best I can tell at the moment, there's no question it is going to work. We know we're headed in the right direction in terms of the market. The basic numbers are headed in the right direction. It's now just a matter of when."

Los Angeles County spent $390,000 last year to send a million pieces of mail, essentially to itself. Much of it was then sorted by workers and, after awhile, sent to the shredder. County supervisors this week called it a cumbersome and costly exercise in futility, born of a federal requirement that the county send letters to the 1 million or so residents who receive food stamps. Because tens of thousands of those recipients are homeless, however, there are few places to send their mail.

The proliferation of electronic communications--from telephone voicemail to facsimile machines to computer messages--is raising new questions of privacy that are leading to a growing number of legal disputes. Earlier this year, the mayor of Colorado Springs, Colo., acknowledged that he routinely read electronic messages that city council members sent one another on city-bought computer terminals installed in their homes.

The otherwise excellent article, "Electronic Mail: A Revolutionary Courier Aims to Become Routine" (Feb. 24), did contain one error. The article stated it is not possible for a subscriber to one service to send mail to a subscriber on another service. Since I am sending this letter via MCI and The Times is receiving it on Western Union, this statement was obviously untrue. Yes, it can be done in the other direction (Western Union to MCI) too. JULES T. WILLIAMS Silverado, Calif.

I've been a regular user of MCI's electronic mail service for several years. But new software for both the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh make the service easier to use, more enjoyable and more powerful. MCI Mail, which claims to have about 100,000 subscribers, calls itself the nation's new postal service. It can transmit instant electronic messages between subscribers or "paper mail" to almost anyone in the world. It can also be used to send and receive telex messages.

America no longer needs a good five-cent cigar. These days, where would you smoke it? No, what America needs now is a good, cheap electronic mail address. While we're at it, how about an easy-to-use interface and a sensible way to keep track of incoming e-mail? MCI Communications thinks it has the answer, and after trying out their new Friends & Family Mail, I'm convinced that they certainly have an answer for many users across the spectrum of experience.

Melissa Lipton was sitting in her office when her computer chimed its friendly tone to announce an e-mail. She opened it. It was a personal letter, written by a man she didn't know to a woman she didn't know but who had passed it on to a female friend who passed it on to another. The story is oh so familiar. "You seem like a nice person, and I don't mean this as badly as it might sound, but . . . I immediately rule out women who put up too many barriers. I do this simply to economize on time.

Some users of the Prodigy electronic communication service are responding to its price-increase plans with a brief message: "Boycott." The protesters--angered because Prodigy last week announced that it would soon begin to charge subscribers for using its electronic mail service--are asking other subscribers to abstain from purchasing products promoted through advertisements on the service.

An executive for Toyota Motor Corp. in January urged colleagues in an e-mail to "not mention about the mechanical failures" of accelerator pedals in its vehicles, prompting a response from the company's top U.S. spokesman that said, "We are not protecting our customers by keeping this quiet," according to internal company documents reviewed by The Times. "The time to hide on this one is over," the e-mail from spokesman Irv Miller continued. "We need to come clean." The exchange, which occurred just days before a massive recall of Toyota vehicles to repair accelerator pedals, is the clearest indication so far that the Japanese carmaker was debating internally when to disclose that its accelerators pedals could become stuck and cause drivers to lose control of vehicles.

In a rare corporate rebuke of Asia's economic superpower, Google Inc. on Tuesday said it might leave China and the country's 350 million Internet users after it was the victim of a series of cyber attacks that originated from that nation. According to Google, a "highly sophisticated" December attack on its main corporate computers resulted in "the theft of intellectual property." The company said it believed that a key goal of the attackers was to access the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, raising the possibility that China's government not only may have hacked in to Google but also may have been using the company's network to conduct political espionage.

Citing e-mails that critics say cast doubt on global warming, congressional Republicans called on the Obama administration Wednesday to suspend efforts to combat climate change until the controversy is resolved. In a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency, the lawmakers requested that a pending move to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act be halted, along with plans to limit emissions from vehicles, power plants and other sources, "until the agency can demonstrate the science underlying these regulatory decisions has not been compromised."

Is it a "Warmist Conspiracy," or a case of an e-mail being "taken completely out of context"? Regardless, the latest dust-up over the science of climate change appears unlikely to affect the dynamics of either a pending debate in the Senate or international climate negotiations in Copenhagen next month. Conservative bloggers have seized on a series of e-mails between leading climate scientists, which were obtained by computer hackers and posted online last week, as evidence of a scientific conspiracy to push claims about human-caused global warming.

Los Angeles became the largest city in the nation to move to Google Inc.'s vision of online computing as the City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to outsource e-mail to a Web-based system run by the Internet search giant. Despite a flurry of lobbying by arch rival Microsoft Corp., the council agreed to shut down the city's in-house messaging system and transfer e-mail operations for its 30,000 employees to Google's nationwide network of servers. The decision could have implications for other major cities and large corporations considering whether to stay with older e-mail programs, such as Microsoft's Outlook, or to embrace the "cloud" model championed by Google.

To Google or not to Google? That's the $7.25-million question the Los Angeles City Council is expected to answer today as it ponders handing over control of its massive e-mail system to Google Inc. Beyond questions of whether the city would save money, the decision is likely to influence other cities and businesses considering whether to stay with older e-mail programs, such as Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook, or to jump into the future of cloud computing. Nearly six months after city technology officials selected Google's proposal to replace the city's e-mail system (which is from neither Microsoft nor Google)

A year after going "on line" with an innovative public computer network, Santa Monica's PEN system is functioning as a 24-hour electronic town hall meeting, as well as a sort of free party line that allows people to eavesdrop on others' conversations. While one group may be electronically debating the merits of a proposal to build a public shower and locker facility for the homeless, another group is chatting away about the shortage of available and compatible company of the opposite sex.

As a 20-year member of the Writers Guild of America, Jonathan Prince was startled to learn that his union was accusing him of being a scab during the writers strike. But he was even more stunned when he learned that the guild had been relying on a secret informant, code-named Clyde, who he and his attorney said had gained unauthorized access to his private e-mails. Prince, executive producer of recent TV dramas "Cane" and "The Cleaner," was among a dozen writers who were investigated for picking up their pens and working -- or failing to report those who did -- during the 100-day writers strike that began in November 2007.

As Google and Microsoft battle for dominance in technology, a skirmish in Los Angeles City Hall is offering a rare public glimpse into a rivalry that could help determine the fortunes of both companies -- and, quite possibly, how workers in the future will communicate. The two tech giants are clashing over a $7.25-million contract to replace L.A.'s outdated e-mail system. The stakes are high enough that both companies have fielded teams of lobbyists and executives to press their case in City Hall.