The political story shows how email has become like regular speech, free but regulated, poorly divided between public and private, and career-limiting when misused or misplaced. The law says that you can’t use government time or property to do political work, and that includes government email accounts, government email servers and arguably government bandwidth. It seems a thin excuse for a public figure to say “I used my personal email account to do that” when politicians all know that their private lives are under scrutiny and seem to be fair game for political maneuvering. Email is no different, and the coverage this business is receiving proves is. And don’t think that I’m taking sides here – doing dirty deeds by email, hiding said email and subpoenaing the other side’s email are all bipartisan sports that we will see played again before long.

From a technology perspective, email is hard to completely delete, but also hard to track down once it has left the sending server for the greater internet. If somebody accesses a webmail account at work and sends some non-work email, where’s the trail? There’s probably no record on the work pc, but the message went through the company’s network to the webmail provider’s server and then on to whomever. That said, you can’t blame email or web technology for what’s happening on the hill, you can only blame legal loopholes and liars who love them.

The Virginia Tech story asks a much more important question: in matters of life and death, is email good enough? We all know that people, especially young people, are tethered to their electronic communications. People sit at their desks and check email every minute or two. Others break out in hives if the go ten minutes sans Blackberry. But when you’ve been assaulted, you don’t send email to the police, you call 911 and speak to a person.

I have no idea what kind of information constitutes a threat requiring immediate notification, but let’s assume that away and ask, what can an organization (or a government for that matter) do to alert lots of people to a great danger quickly? There’s the emergency broadcast system for terrestrial radio and TV, but those media are less dominant every day. Maybe low-tech is best: air raid sirens and fire alarms work well over small areas. Some have suggested that mobile phone text messages would have been most effective.

As with the political story, there are assumptions here about how email stacks up to other methods of communication. It’s conventional wisdom that everybody reads email constantly, maybe even true in some contexts, but when it really counts, email is not enough.

Email does matter. Sometimes it matters an uncomfortably large amount. We probably can’t live without it anymore. But it’s just one of a range of communication tools. If you want to make a positive difference in politics or business or life, it’s going to take more than email.