E-MAIL TIP

Have you ever sent an e-mail message only to have it bounce back to you with a subject line of "Returned mail: User Unknown", "Email Nondelivery Notice -- Failed Message", or "Failure notice"? At one of my e-mail accounts I even get this very polite message: "Hi. This is the qmail-send program at hotmail.com. I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses. This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out."

If you have your e-mail account through Winnefox, to send a message to anyone else within Winnefox all you need to enter in the "To" field is the user name, and Pine will fill in the rest of the address as "@winnefox.org". But if you misspell a person's user name, within 30 seconds you'll receive an automated Delivery Notification message from PMDF e-Mail Interconnect because the addressee is an "unknown or illegal user" (don't worry, the error message sounds more sinister than the problem is!)

Check a copy of the WALS E-Mail Address Book (the one you received in your e-mail training packet) to see if you simply misspelled the user name, or mistakenly included an apostrophe or hyphen. If that solves the problem, you can try re-sending the e-mail to the corrected address (you can edit the original message that should be in your Sentmail folder). If you need another copy of the WALS E-Mail Address Book, please contact me at schwarz@winnefox.org (but not schwartz@winnefox.org!)

In Pine, as well as other e-mail software applications, other common reasons for "returned to sender" messages include:

• a misspelled account or domain name (avoid typos by cutting and pasting the return address, or using the reply function)
• a person may have added "nospam" or other word in an address to avoid being "spammed" with junk e-mail (check for a different e-mail address in the "Reply to" field, or the sender's signature file may state "delete nospam in my address to reply")
• there may be a firewall at the other person's end that doesn't allow incoming e-mail from outside domains
• a temporary problem at the other person's end (low disk space, a network brown-out, or the remote server is down)
• the sender's 10 free hours at AOL are used up, and the account has disappeared

INTERNET TIP

If you don't want to use a search engine to start your web search, try an Internet directory that's full of links evaluated, selected and created by librarians. The Librarians' Index to the Internet is a "searchable, annotated subject directory of more than 3,800 Internet resources" that's meant to be a "reliable and efficient guide to described and evaluated Internet resources." It's a very high-quality, selective catalog of over 40 major categories, with many subcategories under each. All links have been selected and annotated by librarians. Birmingham Libraries at Indiana University even calls it the "Librarians' Yahoo."

WINDOWS 95 TIP

Do you ever worry about your PC running out of memory and crashing when you're opening several programs or applications? Follow Tracy's instructions to place a resource monitor on your taskbar's system tray.

If you've ever have problems with Windows 9x, you may appreciate reading about the problems Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would have had if they'd been using Win1776 to write the Declaration of Independence!

USEFUL URL O' THE MONTH

The Choice Web Review Supplement is a compilation of 482 reviews of Web sites appearing in Choice over the past year. The print magazine contains short, evaluative (and updated) reviews of sites reviewed in the August 1997 Special Supplement, sites reviewed in monthly issues of Choice since September 1997, and sites new to this Supplement, not previously reviewed by Choice.

Choice is a publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association.

FUN URL O' THE MONTH

For a pleasant diversion, try Library Science Jeopardy. Just like the popular television version, you provide your answer in the form of a question. There are six categories to select from, each containing five answers in ascending order of difficulty--the higher the value, the tougher the question. Click on any of square and you'll find your first answer. Below the answer will appear four possibly correct questions, from which you must select the correct question.

At least when you get a question wrong, Library Science Jeopardy is encouraging rather than discouraging: "Chin up; keep focused."

RECIPE O' THE MONTH

is Ginger Meatballs.

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