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I received this e-mail from Australia: 'Dear Charlene and Ben, just a brief note to say 'Hi', in the hope that I have found the correct e-mail address while doing a search on the Net. Hope you are both well and settled in your new home. How's the Citroen? Anyway, I hope this is the right Ben Tisdall (how many could there possibly be in the UK?) Love Janice.'

Well I wasn't the right Ben Tisdall, but had always thought, wrongly so, that the combination of a fairly unusual Christian name and an unusual surname might mean I was unique. To make matters worse I really have got a Citroen, though I don't know anyone called Charlene.

The real Internet revolution has nothing to do with the Web and everything to do with e-mail. It breaks down international barriers, allows people like Janice to e-mail me and means that many people, myself included, now prefer e-mail to the telephone for general business use. It's quick, it's easy and above all it has an audit trail. You can search back through 5,000 e-mails to check that you really did send that message and when the reply was promised.

Hand in hand with business use of e-mail goes the trivial side. Someone sends you a joke, you forward it to your friends, they forward it to their friends and suddenly millions of copies are whizzing round the world clogging up servers and wasting incredible amounts of company time. I lost count of how many jokes, animations and graphics I received on the Clinton/Monica Lewinsky theme. Some companies now make opening or sending attachments a sackable offence, and more will follow.

And that's not the only hazard of e-mail. People become slaves to it.

They send e-mails instead of phoning people and send e-mails instead of going to see the person in the office next door. E-mail is great because you can think before you speak (so to speak). But once you've sent that angry e-mail you can't get it back. The other beauty of e-mail is that unlike the phone you don't have to deal with it immediately. If you set your e-mail to pop up on your desktop or check online too often, however, you might as well have been stuck with a phone. Optimum use of e-mail requires the discipline not to look at it too often, no matter how intriguing that e-mail from Janice in Australia looks.

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