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You use email because it is fast, cheap and simple. Yet, sometimes you miss the personal touch of a handwritten note. Or being able to quickly sketch a drawing, possibly the way to your house? Or getting a colorful painting from your 3-year-old nephew?

Well, you can do all this with email. Just launch a paint program like Paint (sic!). Paint, draw, and write as much as you like. Save the result as a GIF. Attach it to an email message. Hope the recipient knows how to open the file, and knows how to reply.

That's not what you want. That does not feel like email. It feels like putting a frame around the television, hanging it on the wall (not easy!) to pretend it is a painting.

True Handwritten Email

Handwritten email like the service offered by riteMail does feel like email. You write your messages in a Web browser. This makes riteMail feel a bit like Web-based email.

You do not have to use any special picture editing software. All the tools you need are right there, easy to use.

You do not have to save, convert, optimize and attach pictures to emails. You insert a recipient and a subject, and if you press the Send button, your message is delivered.

The recipient does not have to save any attachments, check them for viruses and find a suitable program to eventually see your message.

The recipient can reply directly, with your original message included. This is one of the best aspects of email, and it is available with handwritten email, too.

How Does Handwritten Email Work?

Handwritten email in the form of riteMail takes advantage of Java. RiteMail messages are composed in a Java applet. When you click the Send button, you do not send an email message directly to the recipient.

Instead, the Java applet takes what you have sketched, encodes it in a format that saves network resources and sends it to a riteMail server, together with meta-information like who the sender is, what email address the message should be sent to, and what the subject is.

Of course, an email message is sent to the recipient you specified. It contains HTML code that embeds a Java applet in the email message. This only works with email clients that both understand emails formatted in HTML and have Java enabled (Outlook Express, Eudora, or Netscape Messenger all can do that). Users with other email clients are directed to a Web page with HTML code similar to the email. At least the same applet is embedded in that page.

This Java applet, accessed either from within the email program itself or from a Web browser, displays the actual message as it was sent using riteMail. It fetches the message that was encoded and stored at riteMail's servers when the mail was sent. Then the message is decoded and displayed in its original form.

If the recipient decides to respond, the first Java applet from above gets into action again. With the original message included, the writing and painting, sending and receiving can start anew.

Implications and Limitations

With riteMail handwritten emailing, everything happens online. The applet for composing messages is kept on riteMail's servers, as is the applet for viewing messages. Most importantly, the actual messages are stored there, too.

This means that messages cannot be read and composed off-line. In order to read a riteMail message, you have to be online every time. This also means that a return receipt system is already in place. When you retrieve a message from the server or send a reply, this can be logged.

You can file riteMail messages to folders. But since the actual message is not available in a textual form, riteMail messages cannot be indexed or searched. This is no problem as long as only few handwritten emails are sent. But as volume (and the amount of archived messages) grows, some handwriting recognition technology and an indexing service should be integrated.

"Handwriting is civilization’s casual encephalogram."

Lance Morrow

bye,
-einz.

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