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It's not news that a lot of chess is played over the Internet and the Web. If you enjoy playing on ICC, FICS, Yahoo, or similar, perhaps you haven't discovered that there is an alternative to these services : chess via an email server. Just like over-the-board (OTB) play can be controlled by a server, with moves transmitted instantaneously between the players, email play can also be controlled by a server, with moves transmitted by email.

Email chess play via a server is an evolution of email play, which is itself an evolution of postal play. Email chess and postal chess are often grouped together under the term correspondence chess.

It's possible to play email chess without any special external services. You send your move to an opponent using email software and later receive your opponent's move via email. What could be simpler? While more than adequate for a friendly game, unsupervised email chess has some serious drawbacks for organized competitive chess. Here are a few.

1) Counting elapsed time : In classic postal chess, time is counted using days. When you send a move, your postal service cancels the stamp on your card or envelope with a timestamp showing the date it was received by the postal service. A few days later, your opponent receives your move. After thinking a few more days, your opponent sends a response to your move, which is also timestamped.

The elapsed time allowed for thinking about a move is limited by the rules of the competition. Both players may have 3 days to make 1 move -or- perhaps 30 days to make 10 moves. If either player fails to respond in the time allowed, the game is lost by time forfeit.

In email chess, messages can be delivered almost instantaneously. You send a move via email and your opponent's email service provider usually receives it a few seconds later. The next time your opponent retrieves new mail, your move is there with the rest of the messages. Counting elapsed time using days has little meaning and can even be confusing when the opponents live in different time zones, as they often do.

2) Lost messages : Just like postal mail, email rarely gets lost. When it happens, there is no reliable trail to determine whether a message was really sent, whether it was delivered, or whether it was received. Some email players have observed that moves sent by email seem to be lost far more often than messages that have nothing to do with email chess!

3) Different positions : Sometimes the opponents, usually through a clerical error by one player, end up playing different positions. This might be hard to understand if you've never played correspondence chess, but it happens all too often. Here's a typical scenario:

One player sends an ambiguous move (like Rd1, meaning Rad1 instead of Rfd1); the other player fails to notice the ambiguity and records the other move (Rfd1 in our example). Although neither player suspects that there is a problem, suddenly the positions are different for the two players.

A few moves later one of the players makes a move which the other player considers illegal. After exchanging more messages to find out what happened, the game gets rolled back or an arbiter gets called in to settle a nasty dispute.

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