They thought it was the electronic equivalent of a conversation between two people in an empty room.

Disk drives are the computer's memory, the electronic equivalent of a file cabinet.

The judge accepted that a string of emails was 'the electronic equivalent of a hard-copy letter' - although he also found the mortgage to be invalid.

As the recipient directly bears the cost of delivery, storage, and processing, one could regard spam as the electronic equivalent of postage-due junk mail.