Download SailMail Primer

SailMail Primer
Fully charge your batteries JUST PRIOR to using SailMail. Marine SSB's are intolerant of
even slightly low battery voltages, particularly when sending data. By trying to connect to
the SailMail station with anything other than batteries that are fully charged, you are
wasting your own time and batteries, as well as using more station time than is necessary.
You will occasionally hear vessels whose signals sound garbled or distorted (unsuccessfully)
calling the SailMail station. This garbled sound is nearly always caused by calling with
batteries that are not fully charged, but can also be caused by RF getting into the Pactormodem/radio wires or by over-driving the radio.
The system automatically computes a running average of your connect time over the last 7
days. Limit your usage to a running average of 90 minutes per week.
Carefully control access to your SailMail email address. Give it only to responsible friends
and family members. Explain to them that the SailMail system sends email VERY SLOWLY
and devastates your onboard batteries, and they should only send you important and brief
email messages.
NEVER post your SailMail address on a website. If your SailMail address does get posted
on a website, it will get "harvested" by the "trawling" programs that spammers use to find
email addresses from the web, and you will start to receive spam messages within a day or
so.
Instruct your correspondents not to forward to you Internet jokes and frivolous emails.
Forbid them from putting your SailMail address on chain-emails, jokes, postings to Internet
news-groups, websites, or widely cc'd emails that will attract SPAM to your SailMail
address. If your SailMail address ends up on SPAM mailing lists, your SailMail account will
become useless because it will become too time consuming for you to download all of the
SPAM in order to get to the few messages that you really want to receive from close
friends and family. If you maintain a website with your cruising newsletters, do not allow
your SailMail email address to be visible on the website. If it is, it will end up on SPAM
mailing lists. Before you joined the SailMail Association, there was never a single SPAM
email sent to your SailMail address, and the SailMail Association never releases any
member's email address to anyone. If SPAM starts, it is because of something that you or
one of your correspondents has done. If one of your correspondents does err, and your
SailMail account does end up on the SPAM lists, contact [email protected] and we can
change your SailMail email address. This will require you to inform your (desirable)
correspondents of the new address. It is far preferable, however, to avoid the problem in
the first place.
If you want to distribute email newsletters to multiple email addresses, designate a close
friend to act as an Internet postman. Send one copy of your newsletter to your "postman"
and let him or her forward your email newsletter to a list of email addresses (and/or post it
on your website, after having first removed your SailMail address). Internet addresses
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