Re: [Leica] RE: "Folks"

[Brian Reid <reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>]

This issue, of email addresses representing companies, is nothing new. In the
days of typewriters, it was not uncommon to have a drawer full of stationery
representing different faces, and part of sending a letter was deciding what
letterhead to send it on. It wasn't uncommon for a small engineering company to
have 10 different letterheads, and for each senior engineer at that company 
to have a personal letterhead. I can remember a lawsuit as recently as 1985 in
which a summer employee of Xerox wrote a letter to a car dealer on Xerox
letterhead, complaining about the lousy service that he had gotten. He got the
Xerox letterhead out of the supply closet, and had had no training in the
proper use of letterhead.

I have about 30 email addresses. Which one I use to send a message depends
completely on why I am sending it, who I am sending it to, and what image I
would like to present to the recipient. This one, reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us,
is my "I represent only myself" address. But I can send as an employee of the
department that I work in, or of the university that I work at, or various
nonprofits that I represent. I am also a consultant to the local public school
system, and I can send with a "Palo Alto Public Schools" return address. Or I
can send from silly addresses like tiresias@deadbishops.org or
reid@rutabaga.org or reid@haddockseyes.com. There are also addresses whose
purpose is to play down my identity, such as "postmaster" or "mailroom". The
sending address is the email equivalent of letterhead, and I choose just as
carefully now as I did when I used a Selectric. 

It is not hard to get multiple email addresses, and it is not hard to configure
mail programs to let you choose the address from which you send. Eudora (which
I used for years) and Mulberry (which I use now almost exclusively) both have a
popup menu that lets you select instantly from a palette of identies. 

Brian Reid