In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and all of the stay-at-home orders that were issued, businesses all around the globe had to shut down and find ways to allow their employees to work from home. Although digital mail had been around for quite some time, as the need for remote access for workers began to grow, the digitized mail solutions industry grew alongside it.

What is Digital Mail?

Mail has been around the United States for a couple of centuries. In the old days, it was delivered by horse and buggy and took a long time to get from one place to another. As time moved forward and technology began to evolve, some innovative developers created a solution so that physical documents could be transformed into digital documents by scanning them from hardware and saving them onto a drive with software. Digital mail is physical mail that has been transformed into digital documents that can be moved, copied, forwarded, and sent through the digital world.

Electronic Mail

Electronic mail, or as everybody else calls it email, is mail that is created and sent electronically within the digital realm. The very first uses of email were extremely limited and allowed messages to be sent from people only on the same computer. Electronic mail actually started out much like instant messaging. A user could only receive a message if they were online at the same time as the person who sent it. Developers continued to push the limits and explore possibilities until they came up with the extremely popular email systems that we have today.

Email and Digital Mail

The main difference between email and digital mail is that electronic mail is created in an electronic environment, and digital mail is physical mail that has been converted into a digital format. Email generally consists of a remote platform with a mail server. It travels across the internet much like the pages of a website. As a browser interprets bits of information from the website and transforms them into pictures and text that you can understand, an email message is transferred bits of information from one webserver to another that becomes available to the reader when they get the notification that email is in the “inbox.”

Since you can print the contents of an email onto a sheet of paper, email can be converted to physical mail as well. However, the initial message was created electronically and the initial message of digitized mail was created physically. Once physical mail becomes digital mail it can be sent via an email message.

The Digital World

The digital world is made up of the fascinating relationships between science, hardware, and software. The developers with their scientific knowledge have been able to capture a place between the physical and digital world where devices can communicate with software in order to create an environment that we, as humans, can see and understand. Down below the surface, the digital world is merely zeros and ones that are one or the other in the answer to sophisticated questions that are also coded in zeros and ones. Behind the scenes of your web browsers and emails are seemingly endless strings of code and embedded instructions that tell the browser what to project onto your screen. One of the greatest jumps of technology was the ability to transfer physical data into digital data. It is because of breakthroughs like this, we have been able to keep working and moving through the internet in times of shutdowns and quarantines.

Digital Transformation

If you have not already taken the steps to start your digital transformation, you might want to look into it soon. The world is changing at an alarming rate and it may be necessary to convert as much physical business as you possibly can into digital business. Everybody has smartphones now, and people like to live online. From shopping for holiday gifts to ordering food, the majority of the population of the United States turns to the internet. If you are not already online, you are probably missing out. Do your research and find resources for digital transformation to see where you stand, and what you can do to find the best plan for your needs.