51 Buff. L. Rev. 337 (2003)
You've Got Mail: The Modern Trend towards Universal Electronic Service of Process

handle is hein.journals/buflr51 and id is 347 raw text is: You've Got Mail: The Modern Trend Towards Universal Electronic Service of Process JEREMY A. COLBYt A modern trend exists in the law toward universal electronic service.' Indeed, federal courts have recently t J.D., Boston University School of Law, 1999; B.A., Niagara University, 1996. The author is a Confidential Law Clerk to Senior United States District Court Judge John T. Elfvin of the United States District Court for the Western District of New York and a former litigation associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP in Boston, Massachusetts. The views expressed in this article are entirely my own and do not reflect those of any past or present employer or client. The author thanks Scott T. Hanson for his comments. All mistakes and inadequacies, however, are mine. The author's e-mail address is jeremyacolby@aol.com. 1. See BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY 1372 (7th ed. 1999) (defining service as the formal delivery of a writ, summons, or other legal process and defining service of process as the formal delivery of some other legal notice, such as a pleading). Electronic service refers to service made by e-mail, facsimile or other electronic means. E-mail is shorthand for electronic mail, which the New York State Court of Appeals has described as an: Evolutionary hybrid of traditional telephone line communications and regular postal service mail .... [T]o transmit a message, one must have access to an on-line service's e-mail system and must know the recipient's personal e-mail address. Once this is accomplished, a person may communicate by composing a message in the e-mail computer system and dispatching it telephonically (or through some other dedicated electronic line) to one or more recipients' electronic mailboxes. Lunney v. Prodigy Servs. Co., 723 N.E.2d 539, 541 (N.Y. 1999) (citation and footnote omitted). See also Reno v. Am. Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844, 851 (1997) (E-mail enables an individual to send an electronic message-generally akin to a note or letter-to another individual or to a group of addressees. The message is generally stored electronically, sometimes waiting for the recipient to check her 'mailbox' and sometimes making its receipt known through some type of prompt.); .Steven R. Salbu, Who Should Govern the Internet?: Monitoring and Supporting a New Frontier, 11 HARv. J.L. & TECH. 429, 471-72 (1998) (noting that regular postal service mail is known colloquially as snail mail). E-mail is sent over the Internet, which is an international network of interconnected computers ... enabl[ing] tens of millions of people to communicate with one another and to access vast amounts of information from around the world. Reno, 521 U.S. at 849-50; see also Philip Giordano, Invoking 337

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