I HATE Outlook Express and Hotmail!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[hyphenate]

Those bastards are taking our ability to look at our hotmail accounts from outlook express--they're making it a "premium" benefit. And to make things even worse, my friggin OE has been messing up over and over and over again, and I have reinstalled that piece of crap three times in the past two weeks already!! I'm switching PERMANENTLY to my Gmail account, and I'm going to access it through Incredimail. These bastards don't think we have alternatives--we'll SEE how popular hotmail remains when we can't use OE to access it.

It's bad enough that excite, yahoo, and other web-based emails are pretty much doing the same damned thing, and it is a bitch for me with all the font groups I belong to. There are sometimes 200 (or more) attachments per DAY in the groups I belong to, and the only way I found I could keep up was with a large online account like Hotmail in OE, where I could use a program to simply download the attachments in bulk. Taking that ability away from me makes trying to keep up next to impossible.

I wouldn't mind paying a small fee per year, but I would rather that fee go to Excite, for example, than to Hotmail. But it's WAR now--those of us with hotmail accounts that we've used for years--one of my hotmail accounts is now 8 years old--should have been given latitude in this decision. Hotmail sucks.

[Lisa0825]

1. oh that sucks!!!!

That is why I changed from Yahoo to Hotmail... because Yahoo stopped POP forwarding.

I don't know what I'll do now:-(

[matcom]

2. have used OE for YEARS now

and absolutely LOVE IT! don't have a hotmail account though. never appealed to me

[Midlodemocrat]

13. I have both O/E and Outlook and love both

...they don't automatically delete your emails, which is huge.

[SKKY]

3. I use Thunderbird and Gmail, both are far superior...

...in so many ways. 1 gig of online e-mail? Dare you challenge my logic?

[brainshrub]

4. Once I learned how to train Thunderbird to recognise SPAM

90% of the junk dissapeared. It's great!

http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/

It's 100% free. It made email fun again.

[roenyc]

5. use Mozilla

or Firefox. Outlook express is horrible. never use it. have used outlook 2000 in the past but its terrible too. I like yahoo, they separate your junk mail great. and you get plenty of space.

and mozilla is a great program attached to the mozilla browser. or you can use the firefox as a stand alone. love them. have been using them for years instead of IE.

i still use IE browser and i use mozilla at the same time. it works well. get rid of hotmail. its mostly junk mail and there is no way to control it.

[no name no slogan]

6. They don't call Outlook "Lookout" for nothing (n/t)

[TreasonousBastard]

7. ya gets what ya pays for...

and who's to say gmail isn't going to cause problems later on? Just about every free scheme out there has come up with a "gotcha" after a while.

I know a few people who like gmail because they can search their email from anywhere in the world without carrying a laptop with Eudora on it, but if email is important, I can't see why paying for a good POP3 or IMAP account isn't the way. I just use my Hotmail and Yahoo accounts for junk and tests.

Even though I have Verizon DSL, I still keep my Mindspring (now Earthlink)account for email because I've had it since around the time CompuServe went south and they have a pretty good backup system and tech support has even approached acceptable at times. Their spam and virus filters work pretty well too. 10MB per username of email space comes with it, and more can be bought if needed.

There are plenty of other pay services for email, with few if any limits and excellent service. For instance, I have a free Operamail account I actually use that's been reliable for years, and for a lousy 30 bucks a year they'll sell you over 25MB of storage with POP3 download to any mail client. You're on your own for spam and virus filtering, though. Godaddy's got an email deal, too.

[Placebo]

8. So don't use either.

Simple.

[lastknowngood]

9. use incredimail it's great and it will merge several mail accounts

into one.

[WMliberal]

10. guess what they have in common

and think about what that has to do with them both sucking.

[catbert836]

11. As for Hotmail, get GMail

Got it when it beta-ed and I can't get enough of it!

[democracyindanger]

12. Where'd you hear that?

I've never heard that they were going to do that. Sure you're not mistaken?

And gmail is fine...if you're into Google reading your mail...

[hyphenate]

14. This is new

This is from the hotmail "help" file which I accessed the other day to find out why OE wasn't working properly:

Cannot access my free Hotmail account from Outlook or Outlook Express


This topic is not available for MSN HotmailSympatico Mail.

To protect our users from the increasing amount of unsolicited junk e-mail or spam sent from MSN HotmailSympatico Mail accounts through Outlook and Outlook Express, we have reluctantly had to restrict the new use of Outlook and Outlook Express to subscribers.

By making this feature part of a subscription, (which requires a user to provide billing information), we can more effectively manage and put a stop to abuse of this functionality, and help protect you and others from unsolicited mail.

If you purchase a subscription service such as MSN Hotmail Plus or MSN Premium, you get access to your account from Outlook or Outlook Express, along with many other added features. To see other benefits of upgrading your MSN HotmailSympatico Mail or MSNSympatico/MSN accounts or to create a new subscription account please visit our subscription information page.

(The link I tried to use isn't working. If you want to check it out, the first line in the post is the link to the side panel help--it should be easy enough to call it up, since there is no address line in the help panel.)

[Solon]

15. Switch too something else and use Thunderbird, Firefox's E-Mail companion.

That will solve the problem right there.