Section: Email

Email is a program that allows the player to receive and read email from a list. To establish the email in an email program, we would write

    The message table of laptop email is Table of Laptop Messages.

    Table of Laptop Messages

	topic	message	arrival time	read	answered	description
	"memo"	"Memo"	9:00 AM	false	false	"Your boss would like to see you in his office right away."
	"SPAM"	"SPAM"	--	false	false	"Money for you from Nigeria!"
	with 10 blank rows.

Note that an arrival time is provided for "memo" but not for "SPAM". That is because memo is understood to have been delivered already, while SPAM has not. To deliver new email, we would write

    deliver "SPAM" to laptop email.

This would mark the spam message, which already exists in the Table of Laptop Messages, as available for the player to read. It would also set the arrival time.

If the player is in view of a switched on computer that is running this program, the arrival of the message will be reported at the moment when it happens. The text of this report is handled by the "new mail message" of the email program, like so:
    
    The new mail message of an email program is usually "You have new mail on [the random computer which is running the item described].".

To change this output, we would create a different new mail message for the email program in question.

Typing or clicking on one of the topic words will bring up what ever text we have put in the description field, which might be a brief summary or might be the full text of the email in question. READ email will also work.

REPLY TO email is implemented, but generally blocked by the "block replying to email" rule. This is because the behavior of replying to email is likely to vary quite a bit from game to game, depending on whether we want to allow the player some control over the email he composes and what other game-state changes result from sending that email.

If we wish to allow replies to email, we should first unlist the block replying to email rule, like so:

    The block replying to email rule is not listed in any rulebook.

At that point, default behavior of the action is to mark the email replied and to report simply "You reply." It is up to us to elaborate on this in some more interesting way.