2. Problems with electronic mail

        Email is faster than mail and cheaper than telephoning, but it
is unfortunately not as reliable as either. If your message is not
delivered, you are supposed to get back a message saying so, but
messages sometimes in fact vanish without a trace. If you get no reply,
it could be because the addressee didn't bother to reply, but it could
also be because your message never arrived, because his reply
disappeared, because he has moved but nobody ever closed his old
account, because your message was discarded by a spam filter, because
your message was overlooked amid a torrent of spam, because the machine
you are emailing from has been blocked as a spam source (happens with
email from China) or for political reasons (happens with email to
China), or for other reasons.

        Messages should never contain lines with more than 80 characters.
Some terminals will not "wrap" lines, and will only show the first 80
characters of a line. Printers generally behave much worse, either
truncating lines without any warning that anything is wrong, or putting
a black blob whenever the length of a line exceeds their limits.

	Messages should be sent in 7 bit ASCII (except by prior
arrangement with the recipient), _not_ in HTML (web page format),
encoded, or in Microsoft Word or other proprietary binary formats. In
particular, I do not accept Microsoft Word documents under any
circumstances, since I don't have software that reads them.

        The default setting on many systems is not to show the name of the
sender of a message, only an account name. It is therefore always a good
idea to include your full name in the text of a message. This is
important if your account name is something like "mike" (first name
only) or "ncp" (initials only), and especially important if it is
something like "IFQJ100" (no relation to your name at all). If this is
not done, the recipient of you message may have a hard time figuring out
who you are.

    I have been warned that on some systems (probably including most
UNIX systems), the storage area for incoming mail is not backed up very
frequently. This means that messages left in your incoming mailbox may
be lost in case of a disk failure or similar problem. (For example, on
one system, if the hard disk is damaged, then your own files would be
restored to the state they were in less than 24 hours before the crash,
but your incoming mailbox might only be restored to the state it was in
a month before the crash.)