E-mail versus back-in-the-day land mail

Following links, I came across this 2008 interview with author and history professor Eric Miller of Geneva College and in it was this gem:

"I enjoy correspondence [said Miller] but have a now engrained dislike of doing it by e-mail, which, in my experience, has cheapened and disfigured what correspondence was when done by land. 'E-mailing' has now become part of the structure of my day—even a ritual—but I don't usually experience it as a means of joy, as I did correspondence in the pre-internet world."

Miller is younger than me but old enough to have experienced life before the internet. I identify with his comments about e-mail versus land mail and recall the pleasures of writing and receiving many a rambling, handwritten letter. We wrote, in those days, about our lives, the weather, movies, books, issues of the day, our hopes, our dreams, and our heartaches. The letters were stream-of-consciousness and spontaneous and we didn't write such letters (and in particular, expose our secret thoughts) to just anyone. Our correspondents were special people and exchanging letters with them implied special intimacy.

Whether it is impossible to achieve that same sense of joy and closeness using e-mail is a good question. I once had a friend I wrote to for many years and from whom I received many a letter in return. We then decided to carry on by e-mail. It worked for a while--but then we stopped. Why was that? Had the internet changed the nature of our correspondence, or would we have quit anyway? (The answers likely are "yes" and "it's hard to say.")

What I do know is that I miss going to my mailbox and finding one of those personal, handwritten letters inside. A note in my "inbox" just isn't the same.