If e-mail isn't arriving, get a new post office

Q I use e-mail via the Windows Mail program on my computer and my Comcast Internet service. But whenever I send an e-mail to a verizon.net or cox.net address, it doesn't go through. I get no indication this is happening and no return of the undelivered e-mail. What's odd is that everything works fine if I send e-mail through Comcast's Webmail service, in which all the e-mail software is online.

LOYAL YOUNGGREN,

BLOOMINGTON

A If you can send e-mail using Comcast's Webmail, then it's not a Comcast transmission problem.

But determining the cause can be difficult, because in e-mail lots of things that can go wrong on either your PC's Windows Mail program or the e-mail servers at phone company Verizon and cable TV company Cox Communications.

But I suspect the fault lies with Windows Mail, which has generated lots of user complaints about incoming e-mail not being received, sent mail inexplicably not arriving and difficulty using e-mail attachments. So I suggest you switch either to the more recent Windows Live Mail program or to a Web-based e-mail such as Comcast Webmail, Gmail (gmail.com) or Yahoo mail (yahoomail.com.)

You can download the free Windows Live Mail as part of a larger program called Windows Live Essentials, at tinyurl.com/28fdybz.

But my daughter says her Pages documents don't format properly when she converts them to Word to e-mail them to her professors. Can this formatting conversion problem be fixed?

JONATHAN GOODMAN, MIAMI

A No, the formatting problem can't be fixed because Pages and Word are compatible but not identical. But there are workarounds.

One is to save the original Pages document differently. Instead of storing it in the Word .doc format, store it in Adobe Systems' nearly universal .pdf format. PDF stands for "portable document format," and a PDF should look the same in Adobe Reader on either computer.

Another solution is to buy Microsoft Office for Mac ($112 to $165 online, but students sometimes can get big discounts through a university). The Word programs for Apple and Windows can create files in exactly the same format, which will mean the documents will look identical when moved from an Apple to a Windows computer.