E-Gad! it's e-mail!

Ah, summer camp, that magical time warp when contemporary children inhabit a bygone era, bunking in rustic cabins along unspoiled lakeshores, learning ancient arts like archery and canoeing, and living by the light of the sun, the moon and the fireflies. But recently, an invader from the modern world has begun to infiltrate that bucolic Brigadoon. Its name: e-mail.

Founded 101 years ago, Camp Awosting near Litchfield, Conn., is one of the oldest private boys' camps in the U.S. But let no one assume it's stuck in the 19th century. Awosting was one of the first residential camps to offer computers as an activity back in the early 1980s. And five years ago, it became one of the first to offer e-mail. "It satisfies some of the need for instant gratification that both parents and kids feel," says owner-director Buzz Ebner. Each child has an individual account and can receive and send e-mails during free time on the camp's 11 networked terminals. Any problems? Sometimes parents become alarmed when their child fails to respond promptly to their e-mail--usually because he is too busy with camp activities.

Since then, thousands of other camps have begun to follow Ebner's lead. "In the past couple of summers e-mail has become a hot ticket," says Jeff Solomon, executive director of the National Camp Association, who estimates that as many as 75% of the nation's 6,000 residential summer camps offer e-mail access of some kind, up from just a handful a few years ago. "Camps have always wanted to respond to parents' concern that there be good communication. Mail is a little too slow for parents and phone a little too immediate for camps. So e-mail is a good compromise." It's particularly advantageous for parents who live abroad or travel outside the U.S. while the kids are at camp.

Not all camp directors allow the e-mail to flow freely both ways. Camp Vega near Augusta, Maine, downloads and prints out about 1,000 pieces of e-mail every summer night and labels, staples and sorts them for after-lunch delivery to its 320 campers. The kids, however, must write letters the old-fashioned way, with pencil and paper. "One of our goals is to make sure children gain a sense of independence. If they were able to e-mail Mom and Dad to be rescued every time something came up, that would destroy the whole value of camp," says owner-director Linda Courtiss. "Plus, parents would want to micromanage their kids from a distance--and that would be a camp director's nightmare!"

Knowing that many parents suffer mightily from separation anxiety, however, Courtiss updates the camp website daily with 80 freshly snapped photos. "It's the best thing since Cheerios!" she says. "The photos give the parent visual validation that everything is O.K." Patti Soboroff, a Los Angeles homemaker, started using a computer for the first time when her three daughters began spending summers at Camp Vega. "I saw my girls more by visiting the website than I saw my two boys, who stayed home," she jokes.

Though many camps set up their own website and e-mail systems, some are turning to firms like iluvcamp, which provided customized Internet services and training to 130 camps last summer, its first year of operation. Iluvcamp has signed up 500 camps for next summer.

Amid the general enthusiasm, there are a few proud holdouts. Shire Village Camp in the Berkshires of Massachusetts has two computers, and they're both used for bookkeeping and administrative tasks. E-mail--who needs it? "We don't have e-mail for the same reason we don't have TV here. We're trying to create something that isn't like what kids have all year long," says director Margaret Lopez. "We want to focus kids on interactions they're having with people at camp and activities they can do without any technological equipment."

Not all the Luddites are purists. "We're still old-fashioned: no e-mails, no calls in, no calls out," says Pearl Lourie, executive director of three camps, Pembroke in Massachusetts and Tel Noar and Tevya in New Hampshire. But faxing between parents and kids? No problem! "I feel the fax gives children the ability to write a long letter, to start a letter during rest hour, put it away, then pick it up and continue writing it later," she says. "I don't think that can happen with e-mail."

Of all the means of communication available, most kids still prefer to get letters through the good old U.S. mail, say camp directors. Nothing beats the intimacy of Mom's handwriting or Dad's clippings of the latest sports stats--and no one has yet figured out how to tuck a crisp $5 bill into an e-mail or fax for spending at the camp store (though that will come soon enough). No matter how the mail arrives, says Rodger Popkin, president of the American Camping Association and co-owner of Blue Star Camps in North Carolina, "if we're doing our job properly and children are thriving in camp, the news from home is just a blip on their screen."