Smile: you're on v-mail. (Up front: news, trends & analysis).

According to Forrester Research, 94 percent of Internet users send an e-mail at least once a week, and 41 percent send pictures via e-mail once a week. It is no surprise, then, that video mail, more commonly called "v-mail," a technology that combines voice and video, is becoming increasingly popular and affordable.

V-mail technology has been around for years, but bandwidth constraints and the expense of upgrading a computer to view the videos had resigned it to being a niche feature. But the cost of v-mail services has dropped as several companies have recently introduced cheap v-mail offerings that compress a one-minute multimedia message into the size of a one-page Word document, and Web cameras have become more affordable, too.

Internet service providers (ISPs) worldwide, including AT&T WorldNet, Microsoft Corp's WebTV, Britain's BT Openworld, and Japan's Nifty, are betting consumers will clamor for voice and video e-mails. All that is required is a standard Web cam and v-mail software. Some suppliers charge a monthly fee for unlimited or a set amount of v-mails, while others include v-mail as a free feature for their e-mail offering. Talkway Communications, a California-based firm that provides v-mail technology to nine ISPs, including AT&T WorldNet, says about 100,000 subscribers already have signed up for its v-mail services.

Industry experts say instant messaging software equipped with video playback will become a common feature in the future because many of the incompatibility problems that plagued the technology in the past have been fixed. For example, Talkway says a one-minute video measures 300 kilobytes--that's smaller than a PowerPoint attachment and about one-tenth the size of an MP3 file for a three-minute song. This means the technology will be used at work, too. Some v-mails, such as Talkway's, are embedded in the body of the e-mail and can get past corporate firewall filters.