Ordinary Gweilo

Oh, I hate computers!

I’ve been having problems with email. It seems to have started when my ISP "upgraded" their service (upgrade = weasel speak for replacing old familiar problems with new ones). Outlook appeared to connect successfully to my "mailbox", but wouldn’t retrieve the email (no error messages, but no mail either).

So I decided to try out the email client in Opera. This did retrieve my email, but that was about the only good thing about it. Their concept is to use "views" rather than folders, which would be OK if it worked properly, but unfortunately it doesn’t. The "unread" view sometimes displayed all emails received recently (regardless of whether I had read them or not) and sometimes nothing at all. I simply couldn’t get it to do what I wanted (which was to file way most of my emails and let me see the ones that remained). It also has a rather startling omission – no key seems to be available to scan through emails as you read them ("page down" does this in Outlook and Lotus Notes and probably ever other piece of software ever invented).

So I needed another solution. As I have been having other problems with Outlook, I uninstalled it and tried to install the latest version in its place. This was (predictably enough) fraught with difficulties. It seems that although I had apparently uninstalled Office XP, actually it was still there. So, when I installed Office 2003 and tried to start Outlook it gave me error messages and told me that I couldn’t have multiple versions of Outlook on one PC. No, well, I don’t want multiple versions. That’s why I un-installed it. Grrr.

When I finally got that sorted, Outlook worked (and the old problem was gone), but it was still not retrieving my email. Worse, by now the Opera Mail client was hiding all of my emails after it had retrieved them. I could see it was retrieving my emails, and I could even find some of them by using the search, but they weren’t visible in any of the views. Time to try something else.

Frustratingly, the solution to the Outlook problem seems to be as simple as deleting the email account and creating it again. I’ve no idea why it works, but it does. So I am back where I started, but with a shiny new user interface.

Norton is also on its final warning, and I’m really going to have to follow Henry’s advice and install something else. It keeps giving me stupid messages telling me to re-install it. The first time I fell for it, but subsquent times I have ignored it and all seems to be well (or at least as well as Norton’s stoopid software can manage).

There must be a better way.