Author Topic: Has MS b*ggered up your Live Mail yet?  (Read 4826 times)

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Offline TonyKath

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Has MS b*ggered up your Live Mail yet?
« on: Tuesday, 30 August, 2016 @ 17:06:36 »
If they haven't - don't worry they will!  We got warnings for several months and then about 3 weeks ago they changed the way their mail service sync'ed, which meant that Windows Live Mail would no longer connect with the mail.  I reckon it was part of their plan to get people to switch to Windows 10 which did not work at all for us.

I've been pretty furious about it as Live mail was a great, versatile program and MS had no problem in making a totally unnoticed transition with its mobile based Outlook app.  So why they couldn't create one for PCs I do not know - apart from making dosh of course. 

Since then I've spent many a happy hour  :oki: looking for alternatives for @hotmail.com, @live.com etc etc accounts.    Some possibilities:

There are other email clients out there e.g Mozilla Thunderbird.  They are pretty much unusable if you have been using a MS mail account for the reason that it's exceptionally difficult to import your contact list.  You would need to create a .csv or an .xml file and even then you would need to tweak the field names to get it to fit the pattern of your new email client.  A small detail would be that if you haven't done this before Live Mail goes phut you won't be able to!  Finally you would have to install the client on your mobile devices to sync future additions to your contacts.

We even considered buying into a subscription based Office 365.  Would have got us giving money to MS just like they want us to. :bleh:   There are even some comments out there that its mail progfram Outlook 2016 does not work well for some people - quite apart from paying for things like Word and Excel which you may not want - for the foreseeable future.

Finally I decided on switching to web based mail which I guess a lot of people use.  I had always found it very clunky but MS have definitely improved it.  It seems much smoother on the PC than on the laptop, though.  It's a question of getting used to it and it would never be as good as Live Mail.  One snag is you have to configure your browser to be the default email handler.  I found this article from PC world very helpful.  I did have to use both the add-ons suggested for FF (Live Mailer) and Chrome (Mailto:) but they were very easy to install and work perfectly.

So I'm still mad at MS but I've found a work round which does not give them any of my dosh!  :)

Tony