For the second time in two days, I received a rather pointed e-mail message from a reader of the Erie Times-News, who then quickly followed it up with a request to disregard the first e-mail. Clearly, after sending the message, he thought better of it. Of course, it didn't make any difference, because he'd already pressed the "send" key and, presto! The messages were delivered to me.

It's proof, I think, that e-mail can, at times, be too easy for the sender -- especially for those who have a tendency to be too quick on the draw. You just sit down, let your fingers do the talking, and zip the message off to the person whose attention you want.

Now don't get me wrong. I love e-mail and consider it one of the greatest inventions of ther last half-century. I enjoy receiving e-mail messages, and the more opinionated the better. For me, it's part of the daily give and take with readers. A decade or so ago, however, when I opened my first e-mail account, it surprised me to receive such angry messages. It seemed that a much higher percentage of e-mail was nastier than the letters I received by regular mail.

Once, early on, I traced an unsigned message back to a computer department at one of the local colleges. It took only two or three phone calls to locate the sender, and pretty soon I had the sender on the phone. He'd sent such an outrageous message to me at the newspaper that I felt compelled to respond to him and give him the correct information. But once I had him on the phone, he didn't want to talk to me at all. "Why did you call me?" he demanded, quite irked. "If we must have contact, I would prefer that you e-mail me." And then he hung up.

When I e-mailed him back, explaining to him what I planned to tell him on the phone, he sent me a nice message, thanking me for helping him understand the situation better. I remember thinking to myself, this guy is really bonkers, but we later became friendly e-mail pals, and we still correspond.

At one time, I think a lot of people used to sit down and write angry letters, but then tear them up before putting a stamp on them and dropping them into the mailbox. The act of writing it all out was the cleansing experience they needed. It was cathartic, and they no longer felt the need to follow through with the letter.

I'm a curious type and I'd just as soon receive the letter that might otherwise have gotten ripped to shreds. So, as I say, e-mail is ideal for me. But I can tell when I call many people back who've dashed off angry e-mail messages, that they're not quite as angry in real life as they seem in their e-mails.

It's all part of our instant-connection, modern society. Sometimes I worry about my kids, who are constantly text-messaging and sending code-like missives to their friends. But instead of hanging out on the schoolyard or on the ballfield, shooting the breeze with their pals, they do it all from home, at the computer. That's fine -- it's safer this way, I guess. But I'm concerned that they might not be developing the personal communication and conversation skills that all young people need to acquire at some point.

Forgive me today for not having a more direct connection in this blog to the work we do at the Erie Times-News. Except that, instead of dashing off angry or half-baked messages to our readers, our stories, features, columns and editorials are always pretty well planned out. Somebody -- and usually a bunch of people -- has put a lot of thought into every one of these stories before they make the pages of your newspaper.

Some might say that's a quaint, old-fashioned idea, but 99 percent of the time, once the ideas leave our computers and are printed in the paper, we don't feel a need to retrieve the stories to rework them or eliminate them altogether.

-- Kevin Cuneo