The Online World resources handbook

Electronic mail, telex, and fax http://home.eunet.no/~presno/bok/7.html
computer center.
The exact order of a message's header may vary from system to system, but it will
always contain the vital 'From:' line.
Email: When everything fails
Communications is simple when you master it. Occasionally, however, you WILL lose
data. You may even experience the worst of all: losing unread mail on your hard disk.
A while ago, this happened to my sister. She logged on to her mailbox service using
the communications program Procomm.
After capturing all mail, she tried to send a message. For some reason, the
computer froze. It was impossible to close the capture file. She had to switch the power
OFF/ON to continue. All retrieved mail was obviously lost.
One day, I had a similar experience. After having written a long and difficult letter,
something went wrong. The outfile was closed without warning. The resulting file size
was 0 bytes.
Both problems were solved by the MS DOS program CHKDSK run with the /F
option. If you ever get this problem, and have an MS DOS computer, try CHKDSK or
Scandisk. This may save your day.
Hints
Web by email
Read about how to receive web pages by email in chapter 12. Chapter 11 presents some
neat ways of receiving notifications by email about changes in web pages out there
(including news).
Some old tricks
Bang addressing
"Bang" is American for "exclamation point" (!). The UUCP network uses it in their
variation of the domain addressing scheme.
Example: User Jill Small on Econet in San Francisco used to have the address
pyramid!cdp!jsmall . Read this address from right to left. The name of her mailbox is to
the right. The name of the organization is in the middle. "Pyramid" is the name of the
network.
Note: The ! character has a special function on Unix computers. You may
have to type the address as pyramid\!cdp\!jsmall to avoid unwanted error
messages. The \ character tells Unix to regard the next character as a
character, and not as a system command. You can also precede other
problematic characters with \ in case of problems.
Some email systems can use bang addresses directly. If your system is unable to handle
them, then you must send these messages through a gateway. The American host
UUNET is a frequently used gateway. If routing through UUNET, you may write the
address like this:
pyramid!cdp!jsmall@uunet.uu.net
If your system refuses to accept exclamation points in addresses, try converting the
address into a standard Internet address. Write the address elements in the Internet
sequence (left to right). Replace the exclamation points with % s, like this:
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