Email FAQ

FAQ = “Frequently Asked Questions”

WHAT IS A PUZZLERS' MAILBOX?

The NPL includes a mailbox alias which means you have an address, but not a mailbox per se. Generally, the address is to your Nom@puzzlers.org but isn't always that. You still need a real email address with a mailbox (i.e. your ISP, Yahoo or Hotmail). Changes to email should go to the postmaster@puzzlers.org from our Handy Form.

WHAT IS A PUZZLERS' MAIL LIST?

The NPL has two mail lists:

• NPL-Announce is a low volume, low noise list. Only a few topics are ever to the list and there is no discussion of those messages.
• NPL-FOLK which is a higher volume, mostly unrestricted list. It is “Members only” but otherwise most anything goes, gets discussed, and played with.

HOW DO I SUBSCRIBE TO A PUZZLERS' MAIL LIST?

To subscribe, send mail to the corresponding address:

• npl-folk-request@puzzlers.org with the Subject=Subscribe
• npl-announce-request@puzzlers.org with the Subject=Subscribe

Put SUBSCRIBE into the SUBJECT and, in the body, be sure to add your nom. Subscriptions go to your @puzzlers.org email alias.

Another member just wrote me on my home E-mail and said there is trouble with my NPL mailbox. Who do I talk to? What do I say?

The person to talk to is postmaster@puzzlers.org. He can handle queries and complaints about anything to do with e-mail. But don't pester him for website problems or passwords cause he can't do anything but forward that to webmaster@puzzlers.org.

What do you say? Well, the best way to do things is simply to forward any bounced or problem emails to postmaster@puzzlers.org. If you can, turn on any option to “Show [all] headers.” This is the Blah blah blah button in Eudora, for example, or a checkbox in webmail apps mail accounts such as Squirrel, Hotmail, Netscape.COM or Yahoo! Why you ask? Email headers hold a wonderful trasure of history saying what mail server they arrived at and when. This allows postmaster@puzzlers.org to know if and when your message crossed the puzzlers' email server. And if it bounced, gives a very good idea when the trouble happened.

I subscribe to NPL-Folk. Why do I sometimes get a message hours, days, even a week after I've seen replies to the same message?

The puzzlers.org mail server is generally pretty good about accepting traffic, but often YOUR email servers can being surprisingly poky and cantankerous about accepting it. If your mail server doesn't accept a message to you when the NPL mail server first tries to deliver it [which is generally within a minute or two of receipt of a message], it goes into a 'try again' queue and will incur delays that can be measureed in hours [or worse].

This is a normal behavior for an email server. If you think about it, the more often YOUR mail server refuses a message, the more likely it will also refuse the next time, so with each refusal, the interval before the next attempt increases. How do we know its your server, and not ours? Obviously, the NPL server has seen the email and sent it to everyone else, so it must be a server between the Puzzlers' mailserver and your client. As the postmaster has said, talk to your Internet Service Provider.