Private Message
From Astro Wars
The Private Message (PM) is at the heart of Astro Wars diplomacy. It is the only way inside the game of communicating with an in-game neighbour you don't know. When you receive a PM you will see an alert in your News Screen, and the subject will link to the message in your Inbox. Alternatively, you can check your messages from your Private Messages link at the Astro Wars forums, where it is hosted.
You can find out if the target player has read a PM sent by you, by checking your Outbox. If the message is still there, you can update it without him knowing, but his News page warning will remain even if you delete it. Once the message is in the Sentbox, it means it has been read.
You can send a private message to anyone, provided you know their name. Using the forum's Member List function, you can PM people you never knew about. It goes without saying that sending useless or irrelevant PMs to a large bunch of people is a bannable offense, as is sending offensive or hate messages.
Remember to purge your Inbox and your Sentbox once in a while, or the oldest messages will be erased anyway. To keep important PMs, move them to your Savebox (or copy and store them on your PC). The storage limits for your account are currently 50 messages in your Inbox and 50 in your Savebox, and 25 messages in your Sentbox.
By default your forum account uses the same nickname as your in-game account. You can choose to use another name at the forum (either from an older account, or a newly created one), but any messages sent to that account will not send an alert to your News Screen in the game.
Notes
Private messages are only one way to communicate with other players. When you check a player's profile in the forums, it may contain links to their Email, or their Yahoo, AIM, MSN and ICQ accounts. The player may also be available via IRC, or chat on the Astro Wars IRC Channel.
Most alliances also have their own private forums, where they welcome visitors and recruit new members, as well as discussing strategy and sharing intelligence reports. Alliances will advertise their forums in their own topic on the Diplomacy board at the forums.
