Described are a system and method of communicating with a user of a computing device over a network. Communications occur with a body-less electronic mail messages. The conveyed message is carried by the subject line of the body-less electronic mail message. The subject line records the temporal sequence of one or more text messages representing a chat-like email conversation between users. Each received body-less electronic mail messages appears on a display screen as a line item in a mailbox view. In one embodiment, the entire contents of the subject line are displayed in a drop-down list when a cursor is positioned over the subject column of the line item. In another embodiment, the user scrolls horizontally through contents of the subject line by positioning the cursor over a scroll bar arrow that appears at one end of the subject line column.