3D Mailbox is a stunningly stupid idea. It's pitched as a way to make your e-mail experience more exciting by using 3D imagery to "bring e-mail to life!" Once you've registered with the site and downloaded the client software, you boot it up and find yourself beside a virtual swimming pool. In it, your e-mails swim in the form of shapely nubile young male or female avatars. When you click on an e-mail, its avatar climbs slowly out of the pool.

If you decide the e-mail is spam, its avatar morphs into a monstrously fat dude who then walks heavily out of the swimming pool area to sit down on the beach. If you then delete the spam permanently the fat dude lumbers into shark infested waters, and is promptly eaten. As the application evolves new environments will open up, such as Ancient Rome. Anyone want to feed their spam to the lions?

Even on its own terms, this isn't done very well. As far I could work out you can't see yourself as an avatar in the world, assigning you an odd, eerily absent presence in the virtual space. The graphics are unimpressive and the camera mechanics are crude. Everything. Happens. Incredibly. Slowly. There's no sense of knockabout humour or wit, it looks pretty sketchy, and given how limited the environment is it seems incredible to me that it should have problems with frame rates on my fast gaming computer.

The real problem, of course, isn't how the thing is done. It's what on earth these people were thinking in doing it in the first place. Essentially the software is a perfectly ordinary e-mail client on the bottom of the screen, with some badly cut video scenes running at the top, which bear a vague causal relationship to the decisions you've made about e-mail. The good news is that this catastrophic waste of time and money provides some useful guidelines about the real value of 3D.

Rule One: Add the third dimension for real reasons

Its essential preposterousness is what makes 3D Mail so offensive. The only possible benefit of running this application is that it distracts you from the job in hand. This is a great application for people who don't want to do e-mail. If you actually want to do e-mail, get Gmail or Outlook. If you want to look at virtual babes in bikinis, play Rumble Rose on your PlayStation but don't kid yourself it's a personal productivity app. This is precisely the problem with how some people perceive immersive virtual worlds like Second Life, which is why this sort of thing is so annoying – that the 3D avatar space is there as a voyeuristic distraction rather than as a way of communicating remotely. Grrr.

Rule Two: Some things are great in two dimensions

Reading e-mail is about looking at documents – it's about reading text. E-mail clients can have all the bells and whistles they want, but they are applications for reading what people have written for you. There are loads of great 3D applications: architectural modelling, immersive gaming environments, product prototyping, avatar-based communication and data visualisation, but there are tons of areas in which 3D is just a distraction. When Danny O'Brian did his research into the productivity habits of highly effective geeks he found that they, uh, wrote lists, and uh, stored them in text files. These are some of the most highly productive software developers on the planet. They write themselves little notes in text files. Hello? They know you don't need a 3D word processor to write, "Get milk."

Rule Three: As the 3D hype bandwagon rolls, expect 3D cyber twaddle

There is great interest in virtual worlds within the mainstream media at the moment, and that's made 3D technologies hot for application developers keen to ride the next wave of investment. Just as we watched buzzwords like "Web 2.0" and "user generated content" getting slapped on applications and technologies that had nothing to do with them, expect to see a motley assortment of nonsense products like 3D Mail that are trying, tragically, to catch the same wave. What's so tedious about silly applications like this is that they muddy the waters for people who aren't close to the story. Just as the absurdity of Pets.com made it harder for people to see what Amazon.com was really up to, daft 3D apps will allow people to switch off and ignore the areas where 3D may actually be of value.

Rule Four: Don't be fooled by the pretty pictures

The sad thing about this particular application is that the pictures aren't even very pretty, but what I mean by this is that when you crank up the visual information in a solution it's easy to get distracted from what it's really doing. You've got to ignore the paint work and look under the hood. So for example, a 3D game world like World of Warcraft has pretty pictures, but people don't get hooked on the attractive environments, even though the game does look great. Warcraft is, among other things, an unbelievably clever operant conditioning box that quickly hooks people into pursuing a series of virtual rewards in exchange for certain virtual behaviours. As players are drawn in, the game engineers problems that can only be solved by persistence, team work and effective communication between virtual teams, which fosters a sense of community that further draws players in. You've got to ignore the paintwork and look under the bonnet, because it's easy to get distracted by 3D graphics. Which is another reason why we don't need bikini-clad avatars in our mail clients.

But maybe I'm being too hard on poor old 3D Mail – perhaps you know something even worse? Paste the links in the comments below and I'll hold my nose and take a look…

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Michael Parsons, now editor of CNET.co.uk, was once European correspondent for The Red Herring magazine, and spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.co.uk

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