Microsoft Outlook Express - Software Review and User Report
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Microsoft Outlook Express (msimn.exe) is a competent email - pop3/smtp - program that can check your Hotmail http mail account(s) too, but a lousy news client.
Software Review - Pros
MS Outlook Express comes bundled with Internet Explorer, so it's free. Anyway, it's a competent email client, especially as it's so "incredibly" well integrated with the hotmail.com email service (see first tip in the Tips, Tricks and Troubles section below)...
When talking about Microsoft support I mention the free HTTP mail accounts at hotmail.com which allow you to quickly and comfortably manage your mail with Outlook Express without having to log on the mail server each time you want to read or send mail - which is a major "advantage" as compared to other web-based mail accounts. At least, that's how it's supposed to be. In reality, however, there are actually no less than two gross and one minor disadvantages to this "advantage":
Microsoft Outlook Express's "incredible" integration with the hotmail.com service is not "incredible" at all - on the contrary, it's just plain marketing strategy and nothing more: it doesn't take a genius to see that by closely integrating the most popular email service, hotmail.com, and the most used email program, Microsoft Outlook Express, they would decisively reinforce each other's position in the world market - all to Microsoft's advantage, and not to yours or mine!
since Hotmail's antivirus feature which is supposed to check your incoming attachments is not 100% reliable (and I'm speaking from personal experience here), it is actually substantially safer not to use Microsoft Outlook Express's offsite capability to check your Hotmail account: log onto the Hotmail's web server instead, where you can delete any suspicious messages prior to downloading them to your hard drive when it may be too late for action! Ah, and while you're there, take a minute to
block spammers too (yet another feature you can't do through Microsoft Outlook Express 8) . And don't block'em in bulk, block them one by one: this enables you to block the whole spammer's domain, not just the particular sender account! Do this with caution, though. An ever increasing number of spammers is making use of throwaway Yahoo and other free email accounts - even Hotmail - and you surely wouldn't want to block out all mail sent from all Yahoo or Hotmail users, now, would you?
Software Review - Cons
Microsoft Outlook Express is an impossible internet news client. It:
does a lousy job,
doesn't recognize the now widely used yenc encoding
and is completely capable of permanently deleting all your downloaded news files simply because for one reason or another it can't reach your news server at the moment.
In a word, as a news client, Microsoft Outlook Express just stinks.
User Report - Tips, Tricks and Tweaks
Problems with multiple Hotmail accounts?
At one point in time (being a M$ product, it was bound to happen sooner or later), my copy of Outlook Express started to make problems. It just wouldn't check my Hotmail accounts anymore. I went to the MKB and soon discovered that there was an "issue" (what else?) with Microsoft Outlook Express if you had several Hotmail accounts. The MSB article suggested I should establish multiple "identities" in MS Outlook Express. Multiple identities? I said to my Self. Who, us? my other Self said to my darker Side. You nuts? all my other personas joined in. We wouldn't give in without a fight!
So, equipped with the Proxomitron's Log window feature we almost unanimously (or was it anonymously?) dug into the Registry as we always do when something goes awry, and began experimenting. To no avail. The only thing we discovered was that, apparently, Outlook Express mixes up the login IDs and passwords of different Hotmail accounts. So it keeps trying to log into, say, dr_jekyll@hotmail.com account with the mr_hyde login ID. I then downloaded Internet Explorer 5.5 comprising Microsoft Outlook Express 5.5, just to see if the problem would go away... And it did. Now all my Hotmail accounts are up and running again. The problem is, I don't know whether the new version of MS Outlook Express fixed it, or was it only that the new installation restored the Registry and other settings to their default values. If the latter was the case, I would have achieved the same result simply by reinstalling the old Outlook Express. Well, I guess now we'll never know. Anyway, if you are searching for a more complete, all-in-one software solution for managing all your faxes, e-mails, and pager messages in one place, or a cheaper tool that will enable you to use the Internet for faxing, there are better - although not free - software packages that will do the job.
