An e-card is similar to a postcard or greeting card, with the primary difference being it is created using digital media instead of paper or other traditional materials. E-cards are made available by publishers typically on various Internet sites, where they can be sent to a recipient, typically via e-mail.

E-cards are digital "content", which makes them much more versatile than traditional greeting cards. For example unlike traditional greetings, e-cards can be easily sent to many people at once or extensively personalized by the sender. Conceivably they could be saved to any computer or electronic device or even viewed on a television set, however E-card digital content has not yet progressed as far as digital video or digital audio in terms of varied usage.

Usage

Typically an e-card sender chooses from an on-line catalog of e-cards made available on a publisher's web site. After selecting a card, the sender can personalize it to various degrees by adding a message, photo, or video. Finally the sender specifies the recipient's e-mail address and the web site delivers an e-mail message on behalf of the sender to the recipient.

Printed e-cards

Some e-cards are intended to be printed out instead of sent via e-mail, to most people however are not considered e-cards and are simply home-made greeting cards. The advantage to this over a traditional greeting sometimes can be cost savings, or sometimes simply the ability to "create" something for the recipient instead of choosing a fully completed paper card.

Technological evolution

E-card technology has improved significantly since 1996 around the time of their inception. One technical aspect that has remained mostly contstant is the delivery mechanism: The e-mail received by the recipient contains not the e-card itself, but an individually coded link back to the publisher's web site that displays sender's card exactly as it was originally configured.

Postcards

"Postcards" use static (non-moving) images. These were the first type of e-card in use. The recipient sees a single artistic image, accompanied by a personalized greeting message.

Flash animation

This type of e-card is based on two-dimensional vector animation controlled with a scripting language. The format is proprietary to Adobe, however, widespread usage of Adobe's software allows this type of card to be easily viewed on most of today's computers. The recipient sees an animated short typically 15-30 seconds in duration. The animation often appears to have a cartoon style due to the nature of the content, however, some Flash creations can be quite sophisticated and realistic. A sound track typically accompanies the animation which may contain speech or music.

Flash animated greeting cards can include interactivity, for example, asking the viewer to choose a picture to animate, however, most Flash e-cards are designed to convey the sentiment of the sender through simple observation.

Flash animated cards are offered today by almost all major e-card publishers and are consequently the most common format used.

Mobile Devices

Eventually e-cards were offered that could be sent to mobile devices and phones. Mobile e-cards or 'Mcards' as they are more frequently known were originally created by a UK company called Sharpcards Ltd in 2004. e-cards for mobile devices may delivered via mobile phone networks WAP sites then are downloaded to the mobile then it is sent via MMS straight the recipients handset.

History

The greeting card metaphor was employed early in the life of the World Wide Web, and by Valentine's Day 1996 it was popular enough to be documented. That year, Valentine's cards were offered by Infobahn.com and Sony Entertainment, among others.

In October 1999, Excite@Home bought the web site Blue Mountain Arts (which operate bluemountain.com, an e-Card site) for $780M (which represent a price of $71 per unique monthly user). The transaction has been referenced by CNN and Business 2.0 as evidence of the Dot-com bubble. On September 13, 2001, three weeks before filing for bankruptcy on October 1, 2001, Excite@Home sold BlueMountain.com to American Greetings for $35M, or $3.23 per unique monthly user. The web site BlueMountain.com remains a large web site, primarily focused on E-Cards.

Originally, most E-Cards were free, by virtue of being sponsored by advertising. While free greeting cards are still the most prevalent and popular, some sites charge for either all e-cards or special premium e-cards.

Security

Since many e-card companies are privy to the e-mail address of the recipient and often also the sender, and whether the recipient reads the card, spammers can use E-Cards for finding active e-mail addresses.

Sending an e-card to a given recipient invariably involves giving that recipient's email address to the e-card service -- a third party. As with other third-party email services (such as mailing-list companies), the operator has the chance to misuse this address. One example of misuse is if the e-card service sends advertisements to the recipient's address. Under anti-spam rules used by major ISPs, such advertisements would be spam, since the recipient never asked ("opted in") to receive them. The e-card sender as well as the service could be held accountable for the act of spamming, since while the service sent the spam, the e-card sender provided the address.

In some cases, it may be illegal for an organization or business to use an e-card service to send greetings to its customers. For instance, data privacy laws may forbid a business from disclosing information about customers to a third party -- including names and email addresses.

In late June 2007 a spat of emails with the subject line "You've received a postcard from a family member!" and other similar subjects, was seen making their way across the internet. Unfortunately most of these emails contained links to malicious web sites where javascript was used to exploit the browser in order to compromise a system.