Thanks Milo, all is clear now. :ok:

Yes, I too am/was an Outlook Express fan, but it morphed into Windows Mail on my Vista Laptop, and Windows Live Mail on a recent Netbook Win 7 purchase, but both seem the same to me, only a name change - but as one suffering from EGBF ( Electronic Gadget Brain Failure ) I must be missing some finer points that I will never use ( like many years ago buying an expensive SLR camera lens that had an f1.4 aperture - then taking nothing but shots on the beach, where one had to stop it down to f16 anyway !! - if you see what I mean ? )

Why do "they" have to keep CHANGING things !!

The advantage of O.E. or Win.Mail for me, is that when travelling I can crouch outside a coffee shop offering free WiFi in exchange for buying a coffee, download e-mail from my home ISP via their webmail service, transfer what I need to keep to Win.Mail, then take the computer back to our apartment - that is not wired for either telephone nor broadband - and we can read, and reply to, our e-mails over a free cup of coffee at our leisure, offline, later in the day.

Works for me.

obg

I much preferred OE.

Didn't like the Vista and 7 alternates so moved to full Outlook.

In my case, it is a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but it does what I want. (I have modest requirements).

re Hotmail - I don't think you can get a Hotmail address any more, but Microsoft are rolling out new domains: live.<country> and (recently) outlook.com. For example, I got a live.ie address because I'm in Ireland.

However, as an email provider, Microsoft has one major flaw: they don't like IMAP and don't offer it on free accounts. They prefer that you use their MAPI (Exchange) protocol, which is fine if you use Outlook on a Windows PC, since they have a "Hotmail Connector" for that. For someone like me, using Thunderbird on a Linux system, it's either the old POP protocol (which just downloads mail) or the webmail page.

Why do "they" have to keep CHANGING things !!

So "they" can tell you that "new" = "better" and you should pay to get the "better".

I've been reasonably happy with every version of WIN over the past 12 years (except Vista), only asking that speed and stability were improved. But all we seem to get are bells and whistles hung onto existing software.....which are then marketed as "improvements".

Of course it's not just WIN....my HTC phone running Andy Pandy is perfectly useable as is but keeps trying to download "updates" (or did before I disabled them).

Grrrrrrgh !

There'd be a lot of empty buildings chez Microsoft if they didn't bring out new = better every few years to entice purchase of newer software.

I have no complaints about gmail - I can receive both my yahoo & upc (local web based provider) mail in my gmail inbox as well as mail from company intranet - was easy to set the auto-fwds up and now can access all this on laptop, phone or ipad. Good spam filter (just once in a while a non-spam email categorised as spam but you have 30 days to check yr spam inbox & save it). would recommend to anyone. Plus of course, it's free.

My experience of Gmail is good as well, their spam filter is very accurate and learns quickly. IMAP works a treat, any system that doesn't support it is not worth using unless you have no choice.
Bouncing back spam as if the address is non-existant sounds like a great idea but in my experience it seems to generate more spam rather than stop it. Anyway spammers simply don't care whether the addresses they send to are genuine or not. They won't waste any time on checking for bounced back emails and deleting those addresses from their lists.