Big question
Suzi Pritchard's article (Get the message out, May 24) may well be a valuable collection of tech hints and tips.

But she missed out on question one: "Why should you send lots of similar messages?" OK, she did mention a newsletter or an invitation.

And then question zero: "Should you send all this mail at all?" Usually not. The only exception is where people have told you they want to be on some list of yours for some purpose. Then, by all means, send them whatever mail fits that purpose - this is the opt-IN arrangement that sorts out the sensible marketers from, well, the others.

There is an interesting data protection question. What is the "purpose" (in the technical sense of the DP Act) for which you process your address book? If, like many people, you enter every address that has ever appeared in a message you saw, you probably now hold the addresses of many of your friends' correspondents who are strangers to you. That is almost certainly getting it wrong even if you don't ever use such addresses. If you do use one of them and a recipient complains, your ISP and the Data Protection Registrar are likely to take a dim view.

To be fair, Ms Pritchard did say that it may be bad etiquette, but she said it in the small print. That wasn't good enough on cigarette packets, and it's not good enough here.
Rodney Tillotson
r.tillotson@ntlworld.com

iMac and me

I found the parallels between Sylvie Simmons's experience with computers and mine almost uncanny.

An Apple Performa, limited as it is, served me admirably . But recently, I wanted to do things the Performa could not, so I bought an iMac. The operating system, Mac OS 9, is apparently hopelessly over stretched and, like Ms Simmons, I have daily crashes, and the restart button is showing signs of wear, not to speak of my temper.

I have now given in, and ordered the new operating system, OS X. I am not looking forward to installing it, but maybe it will sort out the problems. The worst is to have to learn a new system.

Is there anybody out there running OS X on an iMac? Any advice?
Denis Moorhouse
denismoorhouse@aol.com

iMac solutions

Sylvie Simmons's comments about iMacs crashing "daily" (May 24) brought back a few memories of my own early experiences with the model. I, too, experienced frequent crashes and a lot of headaches but two and a half years later, the situation has improved beyond all recognition. Hard crashes on my current model are now a rare event.

My advice to Ms Simmons and anyone else with similar problems would be: buy more memory. A lack of Ram is the number one cause of crashes on Macs. Ram is very cheap at the moment and installing it in recent models is a 10-minute job. Go for no less than 128MB -more if you can afford it. Your Mac will even run more quickly.

Secondly: keep your software up to date - and that includes the Mac OS itself. Finally: perform regular disk maintenance. Run Apple's Disk First Aid regularly and consider getting one of the disk maintenance programs available for the Mac as they include useful extra features (try Norton Utilities at www. symantec.com/nu/nu_mac ).
Cameron Paterson
cameronp@lineone.net

Harpic

Jargon Buster ( May 24) tells us that Soap means "simple object access protocol". It may do now, but in the late 1950s, it stood for IBM's "symbolic optimising assembly program", one of the earliest assembly programs. I remember that because I wrote a rival British version for ICL: the Hollerith Assembly Routine for Programmed Input Conversion. Well, writing it certainly sent me clean round the bend.
Eric Thompson
ejt@bigfoot.com