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When you send your stories and/or letters to us, please put your text in the body of your message. If you must send your submission via an attachment, be sure it is in a plain-text format only. There are several reasons for this:
1—Privacy MS Word, and probably other word processors maintain a hidden "revision history" within the file, allowing anyone with a simple text reader to see previous versions you may have written. So, if you started your story from a previous document's template, your story will have buried within it all those documents too, such as letters you may have written which contain personally sensitive and identifying information such as SSAN's, credit card numbers, your street address, phone number, etc. You will have sent your private documents to me! Now, while I am absolutely trustworthy (you already know that, or don't care, because you are spilling your guts anyway), I still don't want to see your private information.
For an extreme example of vulnerability, see:
http://www.computerbytesman.com/privacy/blair.htm
2—Identification Many of you submit your stories using a pseudonym. That's as it should be, again, I don't want to know who you are. But, in MS Word, and perhaps other word processors, your personal registration information as entered in your edition of Windows is also embedded in any Word document you create.
3—Overhead If your story contains, say, around 20k bytes of text, a MS Word document will occupy around 100k of file size. This soaks up vaulable resources on the net and in our computers.
How to send text only: When you are finished writing, save your story in plain text format by using that option in the "save as" dialog box, and attach it to your e-mail.
Or, select the text in the Word window, copy it to the clipboard, then open a Note Pad document and paste the text there, name the file, close it and attach it.
Because of our visibility on the 'net, we are the recipients of an amazing amount of spam, clogging up our e-mail system. We use a service which helps us filter our system against the rising tide of "junk" e-mail.
Everyone who sends e-mail to us gets their e-mail server's address tested against several lists which target known sources of spam originators. If your ISP's e-mail server has been used to send or relay spam to anybody, any mail from it to us is automatically discarded and we will never see it.
If you have sent us e-mail and you have any reason to suspect that we may not have seen it you should ask your ISP whether they are on any of the following lists:
DUL The MAPS DUL (Dial-up User List) exists primarily to prevent trespassing by mass e-mailers who offload unsolicited e-mail, using direct connections to their victims' mail servers without using their ISP's mail server as a relay or gateway.
ORBS The Open Relay Behaviour-modification System is a database for tracking SMTP servers that have been confirmed to permit third-party relay. These servers permit spammers to connect to them from anywhere in the world, usually from a modem connection, and then forward the spam to its intended victims.
RBL The MAPS (Mail Abuse Prevention System) RBL (Realtime Blackhole List) is a system for creating intentional network outages for the purpose of limiting the transport of known-to-be-unwanted mass e-mail.
You should also know that most of our correspondents' ISP's are NOT on these lists. Most of the net's spam comes from a relatively small number of internet domains. Still, we feel responsible for making you aware of the relatively small chance that your mail might not ever be seen by us.