I’ve almost lost confidence in this whizbang gadgetry and ready to take up the pen again. Can you tell me what I’m doing wrong when my replies just disappear after 20 minutes of careful consideration? I’m left with an empty box and have to restart my letters. It only happens occasionally but it’s enough to sap your confidence in the whole business. I’ve done all that I can to avoid this problem…I ’save’ my letters (unsuccessfully in several cases). I am careful not to touch other keys but still I lose them. I use Canberra Schools Network server, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Hotmail if it’s any help. Thanks in anticipation

It is very strange that you are losing your letters when you are using Hotmail since it is a web based email service. The only explanation for this would be that you are timing out. This occurs when there is no activity for a prolonged period of time (ie. 20 min) the server automatically logs the user out. This is to save server bandwidth and for security reasons. If it only occurs when you are writing emails that take a long time to write and not with shorter emails then you have found your problem. The best solution to this problem is to write your email offline. Write your email in an application such as Notepad, or another word processor, and when you are ready to send it, select all the text that you want to send, cut , and paste into the messages body field. The other advantages of this method are you don’t have to rush it and you don’t waste a lot of net time writing the messages whilst online.