The Online World resources handbook

Electronic mail, telex, and fax http://home.eunet.no/~presno/bok/7.html
out the email for free services. USA.NET is one vendor.
Non Latin characters
"Foreign" characters, they call it in some places. Internet experts call it Extended
Character Sets. Those of us with a regularly need to write or read in other languages
than English, might simply call them The Challenge.
In 1982, when email was defined, the decision was made to encode email in such a
way that only 128 different characters letters, numbers, punctuation, and so on could
be transmitted from one computer to another. We are still suffering from this decision! It
means that many people have difficulty sending and receiving mails containing
characters like ‰, Á, and ÿ, to mention a few.
The good news is that there is a way of encoding data so that 256 different
characters can be represented, called "quoted printable".
The bad news is that the underlying transport is still limited to 128 different
characters, so the email gets converted to the more limited set, transmitted, then
(hopefully) converted back on the other end. If the receiving software doesn't know how
to do quoted printable, the extended characters will show up as an equals sign and two
letter/digit code as in this Spanish language text:
Ah=ED van mis saludos y mis =E1nimos para ti y para todos los = argentinos. Sigo
desde hace tiempo con preocupaci=F3n lo que pasa en = vuestro pa=EDs. Me
sabe mal que tengais que pasar por =E9sto y me siento = impotente, sin saber
qu=E9 hacer. No perdais la esperanza ni la = confianza en un futuro mejor.
Finally, even if your friends' email programs know how to convert codes back to
extended characters, different computers have different symbols for the same codes. For
example, the trademark symbol, bullet, and "curly" quotation marks are all legal
characters in both Windows95 and MacOS, but are in different places in the character
set. For example, Windows thinks that character number 241 is a Ò, while the Mac
thinks that character number 241 is a “.
Anonymous mail
Some day, you may want to send a message anonymously. Try Hushmail, designed by
hackers for total security. The mail message's headers are gone. Nobody knows where or
who you are.
Internet's Anonymous re mailers will also let you do that. Check
http://anon.efga.org/~rlist/rlist.html for a list of servers and directions.
Then, visit the alt.privacy.anon server and alt.anonymous newsgroups for more on
anonymous email.
Things Take Time!
How long does it take a message to get from Hyougo in Japan to Saltrod in Norway? To
Dominique Christian in Paris?
Sometimes, mail travels from mailbox to mailbox in seconds. This is usually so with
messages from my mailbox in Norway to Dan Wheeler in U.S.A. and Mike Burleigh in
London.
Messages that must go through many gateways may take more time. How long it
takes, depends on the degree of automation in the mail systems involved, and how these
systems have been connected to the global matrix of networks.
Speed is high if the computers are interconnected with fixed, high capacity lines.
This was not so for my mails from Oslo to Dominique in Paris. Although the Paris is
relatively close, mail was routed through a system in London, and then forwarded only
once a day through a dial up connection. My mails usually took at least one day to reach
the destination.
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