You can send an email to several people in one simple action. Communications
can be divided into four types depending on the number of parties participating
in the information transfer: (1) one-to-one, (2) one-to-many,
(3) many-to-one, and (4)many-to-many.
Each
type of communication has its own attributes and strengths. For example,
the typical phone call is one-to-one, and the typical meeting is many-to-many.
Email
is the most successful one-to-many technology, with respect to both sending
and receiving:
- Sending. You can
send an email to more than one person at a time, for example to everyone in your
family, or to a group of friends.
- Receiving.
You can receive
information that has been mailed to more than one person, for example an announcement
sent to hundreds of people on a mailing list.
The key advantage of this
one-to-many communication is efficiency, since instead of sending emails individually,
you can save large amounts of time by sending one email to several people
at once
(also see address groups).
Similarly, when
you receive an email from an Internet mailing list you are getting information
that would probably be impractical to receive any other way, since most organizations
don't
have the time or resources to send out paper based notices individually to hundreds
or even thousands of people.
