Email and Lawyers
By Gene Melchionne, Esq.
Law Offices of Eugene S. Melchionne
Waterbury, Connecticut
First, a Little History (The Waiting is the
Hardest Part)
I
t has been said that modern lawyers
live in their email. Email is an integral
backbone of NACBA.
The new
communities work to form the main way
our members interact with one another.
As a lawyer with a mostly virtual
practice, I do not meet with my clients
more than a few times; an initial
conference, execution of the petition,
and the 341 hearing. Some NACBA
members I know have cut that down to
only two sessions. The rest of the time,
communications are done by email. I
train my clients not to call the office or
show up at the front door without an
appointment simply to ask questions or
to chat. It wasn’t always that way, but
the need for efficiency in in this time of
declining filings and revenues made it
necessary.
Older NACBA members may remember
the days before Internet access was
available. In the early days, you would
have a subscription to a service like
CompuServe or Prodigy and a handful
of others. They were text-based and
consisted of an online bulletin board
where messages were posted for all
to read. As part of the service, you
received an “email” address where
responses to your messages could
be directed. Although AOL (America
Online) brought the graphical interface
into the mix, initially it also operated this
way. Although I no longer pay for AOL
access (does anyone?), I have retained
my early AOL email address. I rarely
check it, but you can still message me
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CONSUMER BANKRUPTCY JOURNAL
at [email protected].
As the Internet became public and
access got easier, the telephone
companies and others got into the
business of granting access to the
network of computers that form the
Internet.
These companies are
generally known as ISPs (Internet
Service Providers). Using a browser,
you can surf from one web site to
another using the linking in the hypertext
protocol (the http in the beginning of
most web addresses). But the World
Wide Web is not email. A web site can
open a window into an email service,
but all you are looking at is the email
stored on another computer also
connected to the Internet, but not the
email itself. You may be able to read
that email and respond to it, but the
email resides on that other computer.
Does anyone see a privacy or security
issue with that?
The email address you received when
you signed up for internet access is
generally assigned by the provider.
They consist of two parts; the user name
and the domain name. The domain
name tells the computers connected
to the internet where to send the mail
(“the town”) and the user name tells the
receiving computer where to direct the
email (“your street address”).
After leaving CompuServe and AOL
back in the late 80’s, I signed up
for internet access with my local
telephone company, Southern New
England Telephone.
The email
address assigned to me was eugene.
[email protected], an address that
Winter 2018
I retain to this day. Depending on your
contract, you could create additional
email addresses as well, presumably
to service other members of your
household.
Among others, I also
maintain [email protected]
which was the name of my last boat.
SNET no longer exists, but through a
series of mergers and acquisitions,
these email addresses currently reside
with Yahoo.
Computer companies got into the
mix of offering email services and
they maintain multiple domains and
services usually free of charge. That
is how a SNET.net address becomes
part of Yahoo. It’s all free, and as one
of my brothers likes to say, “Free is
free and that’s for me”. Google, Apple
and Microsoft all began to understand
that providing a free email service and
email addresses was an easy way to
draw users into their other services,
some of which cost real money. You
can contact me at melchionne@mac.
com or [email protected],
among others. (It’s that free thing
again.) I don’t maintain a hotmail.com
or outlook.com address and my usage
of gmail.com is severely limited these
days.
With so many people utilizing the
free services, you can imagine that
memorable email addresses are rarer
to find. And until recently, services
like Google scanned your email for
advertising purposes and questions of
security and confidentiality for all of the
services are rampant. Like Equifax,
Yahoo just announced that all of its
National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys