demand from the mail drop server. Thus, we see e-mail as an implementation of the “Push Me – Pull You” access model that we mentioned previously.

In the millions of years of our development, we humans have established means to convey information to each other, and certainly we modern humans have learned to speak without thinking much about it. Through the ages, we talked and made our way through the world. In so doing, our means of expression often became richer depending on our education and other opportunities. However, very few of us had a formal presentation regarding the abstract concepts of what information is really about. On the Web of course, everything was new. Computers could not recreate by themselves millions of years of evolution. They needed someone to tell them how to communicate. Again, since most designers and developers weren’t terribly conversant with the abstract concepts of how humans manage information, we had to tip-toe our way through the virgin territory that was the new networks of computers. When we were at last able to e-mail each other messages, we just didn’t immediately have a set model of how to send more than elementary text through our computers. In fact, the technology for visual and aural display had not yet progressed to the point where we needed to worry about much beyond simple text. So, we had to make it up as we went along. And, “make it up” we did, improvising to the point that even today there is no well established theory of computer content. It just evolved via cooperating and sometime competing mechanisms. What follows is our best attempt to structure a theoretical model of information exchange between computers, a model which to the best of our knowledge is still to be fully specified.

Information has an organization. This organization encompasses an economic facet and a structural facet. In turn, it is subsumed by a trust infrastructure. We will review these elements, drawing parallels when we can between what was devised for computers and what humans had previously conjured up for their own needs. First, we’ll consider organization.

When we send something via the post office, whether it is a letter or a package, it has two distinct parts: an envelope and content. In the same way, a computer mail message has two parts. First, it entails an envelope, which contains facets like the addressee, the title of the message and perhaps some hint of what else the envelope contains. Subsumed within the envelope there is the content, which can be of various forms; for example, a string of text, an image, or, why not, a song.

The envelope of an e-mail message was defined quite precisely in 1982 in a document rather famously known as RFC 822, the standard for the format of ARPA Internet text messages. This document explained how the originator, the destination, the dates, and other useful information were to be conveyed. Anyone who uses e-mail is familiar with the Date, From, To and Subject fields in computer messages. Well, all of that was specified in the 1982 standard and it has served us well ever since. Actually, we are not typically familiar with all the fields of a message, because some are really for computer usage more than for human consumption. For example, in later developments fields were added that allow the sending computer to specify whether the message has been digitally signed, i.e., whether there are means for the receiving computer to guarantee that the message has not been altered during the transmission. Also, the sending computer can indicate whether the message is encrypted, such that even if interlopers intercept the message they have no means of knowing what it says.

When we deposit mail at the post office next to home, we typically don’t write on the envelope whether it contains a letter, a picture or a check. The recipient will open the envelope and is usually smart enough to figure out what is in it. Exceptions must be considered for international letters. For such correspondence, it may be necessary to describe the contents for customs, as it is

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