Chapter 2: E-Mail (6 of 6) -- When things go wrong

WHEN THINGS GO WRONG

     * You send a message but get back an ominous looking message from
MAILER-DAEMON containing up to several dozen lines of computerese
followed by your message.  Somewhere in those lines you can often find a
clue to what went wrong.  You might have made a mistake in spelling the
e-mail address.  The site to which you're sending mail might have been
down for maintenance or a problem. You may have used the wrong
"translation" for mail to a non-Internet network.
     * You call up your host system's text editor to write a message or
reply to one and can't seem to get out.  If it's  emacs , try control-X,
control-C (in other words, hit your control key and your X key at the
same time, followed by control and C).  If worse comes to worse, you can
hang up.
     * In Elm, you accidentally hit the D key for a message you want to
save.  Type the number of the message, hit enter and then U, which will
"un-delete" the message.  This works only before you exit Elm; once you
quit, the message is gone.
     * You try to  upload  an ASCII message you've written on your own
computer into a message you're preparing in Elm or Pine and you get a lot
of left brackets, capital Ms, Ks and Ls and some funny-looking
characters. Believe it or not, your message will actually wind up looking
fine; all that garbage is temporary and reflects the problems some Unix
text processors have with ASCII uploads.  But it will take much longer
for your upload to finish.  One way to deal with this is to call up the
simple mail program, which will not produce any weird characters when you
upload a text file into a message.  Another way (which is better if your
prepared message is a response to somebody's mail), is to create a text
file on your host system with cat, for example,

          cat>file

and then upload your text into that.  Then, in Elm or Pine, you can
insert the message with a simple command (control-r in Pine, for
example); only this time you won't see all that extraneous stuff.