E-mail is a marriage of high technology and the values of the past: in Victorian England, the post, or mail delivery, came six or seven times a day. This led to all kinds of interesting relationships between people who never met, like playwright George Bernard Shaw and actress Ellen Terry, a romantic tradition of disembodied love that is now being revived through countless long-distance online relationships facilitated by e-mail.

Experiments in early technology such as Viewtron, which included a primitive version of e-mail 'way back in the '80s, found that e-mail was one of the most popular functions. Today, e-mail is one of the most heavily-used features of the Net.

You can read an article online in HotWired or Salon, pull up a mailto and fire off a response to the author, and get an answer from his or her comfortable farmhouse in New Hampshire to your LA bungalow within the hour. Moreover, your e-mail response may be published in the e-zine itself, which is tres exciting.

For reporting purposes, you may be looking for someone's e-mail address. It's certainly much cheaper to e-mail a person long distance than to call, and many people prefer e-mail interviews because it gives them a chance to compose (literally) themselves.

If you want to find someone's e-mail address, here are two commonly-used indexes: Whowhere and Four11. Whowhere has U.S. government e-mail addresses, phone numbers and addresses for folks all over the United States, and personal homepage directories for countries, employers, and online communities.

Four11 also has a telephone directory, six net phone directories for such things as Connectix Videophone and CU-SeeMe. It also has e-mail and home addresses for celebrities, including an actual street address for Stephen King in Bangor, Maine and a street address for Christy Brinkley in Beverly Hills. Happy hunting!