For Europeans, e-mail has replaced the business letter. For Americans, it has replaced the telephone. That's why we tend to unleash what e-mail consultant Tim Burress calls a brain dump: unloading the content of our cerebral cortex onto the screen and hitting the send button. It makes Europeans go ballistic, he says.

Susanne Khawand, a German high-tech executive, has been on the receiving end of American brain dumps, and she says it's not pretty. I feel like saying, ‘Why don't you just call me instead of writing five e-mails back and forth,’ she says. Americans are so overwhelmed by their bulging inboxes that you can't rely on getting an answer. You don't even know if they read it. In Germany, she says, it might take a few days, or even weeks, for an answer, but one always arrives.

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