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.