Email vs. Snail Mail

Throughout history people have communicated with each other in various ways. For instance, some used birds to transfer their messages while others used the smoke of fire to signal their friend who were far from them. Lately postal mail was used as a mean for correspondence, which was referred to as snail mail afterword. And with the invention of telegraph and development of civilization a new tool came in known as e-mail. There are significant discrepancies between snail mail and e-mail along with some common points.

First of all, both tools are uses for communication in society, and they are both under risk in terms of confidentiality, but for different reasons. For instance, you cannot be secure that all post offices are safe enough to send your messages that are too personal or contain secret information about your work… etc. E-mails suffer from the same problem but for different reasons. For example your computer can become a victim of hacking and a hacker can get your whole archive in a few seconds. Finally, once they are delivered to the wanted place there is no way going back.

Although they share some common points, snail mail and e-mail are tremendously different in many ways. Firstly, e-mail is way a lot faster than snail mail, it enables you to delivers your message in the blink of an eye, whereas it might take days for a snail mail to receive the place you want. Secondly, for sending an e-mail all you need is an internet connection and you can send it to hundreds of people at once, nonetheless, you can send a snail mail once at a time and you have to pay for it respectively.

Moreover, there are many options for editing an e-mail and sending different types of media files along with it, in contrast to snail mail with which you can only send text messages. In addition, nowadays people are very busy to memorize the address of all of their acquaintance, e-mail solves this too, you can save all of those confusing addresses in your account without any effort, for snail mail this option is not present.

The last and most important difference is that using snail mail we actually use up our natural resources like paper and ink, yet e-mail is a tool the encourages sustainability because you neither use resources nor throw it away after using it. As a conclusion, we can say that although both e-mail and snail are similar to each other to some extent it’s clear that all ways lead to using e-mail and regarding snail mail as an obsolete way for communication.