Mail: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 17:46, 18 October 2026

Mail is how Galactic Empire delivers reports and notices that a player may not see when they occur. The in-game main menu calls these Hyperspace messages and divides them into Distress messages and Production reports. These are broad mailbox categories, not literal descriptions of every message in them: spy intelligence and team notices are filed with distress messages, while notices about full planetary stock are filed with production reports. ge-arena does not use the persistent mail system.

Reading messages

From the GE main menu, choose M, then 1 for distress messages or 2 for production reports. A category with mail is marked NEW. After reading a message, choose N for the next one or X to return. Reading a message deletes it from the in-game mailbox; the menu is not a permanent archive. The sysop's MAILDAYS setting controls automatic removal of old GE-mail messages, with a shipped value of three days and an allowed range of one to seven. See Main configuration reference and Database files.

Classic GE can route its generated mail either to its own mailbox or to the host BBS's mail system through USEGEMSG. The distributed 3.2e configuration has the GE mailbox enabled, although the classic release notes describe a period when BBS mail was the default. ge-next uses the GE mailbox only; it removed the seldom-used BBS-mail route when rebuilding its mail structures. This setting concerns automated GE mail, not the player-to-player SEND command.

Daily planetary reports

During the midnight routine, GE sends the owner a separate Production Report for each owned planet it finds. The report is a snapshot of the planet's name and sector, cash, tax, and stock of every item. It is assembled during daily scoring and accounting, not whenever an individual production pass runs. Classic's report also includes the old planetary debt field; ge-next no longer displays that unused value. See Planetary update cycle for the separate scheduled production passes and Planetary production for what changes during one pass.

Planetary event mail

Event	Recipient and message
Significant troop or fighter attack	The planet owner can receive a distress message identifying the attacker, attacking force, and whether the planet held or surrendered. Trivial attacks are not mailed. If the owner is actively playing, the game may notify them directly instead of queuing this attack mail.
Food shortage	The planet owner receives a distress message when troops or men are lost to starvation during a reported production pass.
Production reaches a stock cap	The planet owner receives a status message identifying the item and the planet's effective maximum. This is filed under the menu's Production reports category. Classic's repeated notices are described in Classic bug: Disabled production repeats maximum-stock notices; ge-next suppresses them when production is set to zero.
Revolt	The former owner receives a message that the population overpowered the troops and the planet became free.
Spy discovered	The spy's owner is told the operative was caught; the planet owner receives a separate protest naming the infiltrator.
Spy intelligence	A surviving spy may send an estimate of one planetary stock quantity. Certain significant attacks can also produce a report identifying the attacker or warning that the planet was captured. Spy reports are not guaranteed on every update or attack; see Classic bug: Planet spy attack result inversion for a classic reporting defect.

TEAM KICK sends a Team Membership Revoked notice to the removed member. In classic GE and ge-next through 0.3.2, the send path did not assign a mail class, so the notice could be misfiled or inaccessible from the in-game mail menu; see Classic bug: TEAM KICK mail classification. ge-next 0.3.3 files new revocation notices under Distress messages. This is an event notice, not part of the nightly production-report sweep.

Delivery and version differences

Classic's planetary scheduler can visit one planet more or fewer times than another in a day, so event mail tied to those visits is not a reliable daily checklist. ge-next records completed production passes and can replay missed ones after downtime. To avoid a backlog of duplicate notices, it sends event mail only for the final replayed pass; the daily snapshot is still generated separately at midnight. See Classic bug: Skipped planetary updates.

Mail delivery also depends on having a valid recipient. In classic, a rejected message could leave formatted text in the shared output buffer and leak it into later output. ge-next clears that buffer when declining mail to a non-live recipient; see Classic bug: Rejected mail leaks into output.