conventions & mechanisms -- WARNING

[Guest guest]

When composing messages using this tool, you can lose a lot of

work by making slight mistakes at any time prior to actually SENDing

a message (a posting or a reply).

 

A week or so ago I lost the whole contents of this text window (where

you type a message) by resizing the the browser window.

 

Just now, I lost about an hours work by inadvertantly hitting the

BACKSPACE key in the preview window (one step away from sending),

which caused the browser (Explorer 5, under Windows) to revert to the

original / template state of the reply window, eradicating all my

work on the reply.

 

Using email programs instead of , one can usually " SAVE " work-in-

progress so that it survives random glitches of usage and OS crashes.

 

I ran a test to verify that a message sent from an email program will

get placed correctly into a thread hierarchy, if you compose the

title correctly ( " Re: ... " ), so one isn't dependent on for that.

 

This functionality isn't perfect. " Caveat emptor " (buyer

beware), especially when it's free.