2.7  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 DELETE(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 may 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. 
     
*  You haven't cleared out your Elm mailbox in awhile, and you 
accidentally hit "y" when you meant to hit "n" (or vice-versa) when 
exiting and now all your messages have disappeared.

The system has put all the messages in a file called received in your 
Mail directory.  To get to the messages, call up Elm again, and hit your 
c key.  You'll be asked which folder to change to.  Type 

     =received

and hit enter.  You'll be prompted as if you're about to exit Elm; when 
done answering the questions, you'll get a menu of messages in your 
receive folder.  You can reply to them, delete them, etc., as you would 
normally.