Patti O'Shea's Blog

Answering email has become a huge problem for me. I haven’t been good about it in a while. Okay, a long while, but in the last six months it has gotten much, much worse.

What happened? I bought a new laptop.

Here’s the thing. Windows 7 does not have Outlook Express (OE), which is what I’ve always used. Instead, it’s Live Mail or something like that. So I decided that I’d use Outlook. I have Outlook 2003 at the Evil Day Job (EDJ) and it’s fine. Some features I like better than OE, some features I like less, but overall it’s a wash. I loaded Office 2007 and prepared to transfer my email over to the new laptop.

This wasn’t as easy as it sounds. OE uses a different file type than Outlook, so I couldn’t simply move everything over. First, I needed to import everything into the Live Mail program. Second, I had to export everything over to Outlook. Aggravating since they’re all Microsoft email programs, but only a little time consuming.

And then I discovered I didn’t like Outlook 2007 for email.

I don’t know why, but for some reason, it’s like I don’t see the email anymore once it’s inside the program. I’ve tried adjusting things. I know the basics of the program well enough since I use a version of it at the EDJ, but no matter what I changed or how I arranged things, I didn’t like it. I still download my email, read it, and forget it’s even there. With OE, I used to keep my email program open all the time. With Outlook, I almost never open it and this might be part of the problem I’m having answering email. It’s hard to reply when the program is closed.

Clearly, I need to do something about this problem. I remembered there was a website that had old versions of software available to download and I headed over there, hoping to find a version of OE. Only I discovered that OE has never been separate from the computer’s operating system, and to get OE, I’d have to download XP and run two systems on my laptop. I don’t want to do that.

I thought I’d give Live Mail a try after all. And discovered that to transfer my notes into that program, I’d have to put everything on jump drive, import it on my old laptop to OE, then export those files back to the jump drive, and import them to Live Mail. That seemed like a hell of a lot of work and what if I don’t like Live Mail any better than Outlook? If I spent all that time to make the transition and ended up not using it, I wouldn’t be happy. Microsoft, why aren’t you compatible with yourself???

Next, I thought hey, maybe I can find another free email program. Thunderbird immediately sprang to mind. I’d tried it before and didn’t like it, but it must have changed since then and maybe I’d like it now. I didn’t.

I checked into other email programs, but after looking at screenshots of the interfaces for multiple programs, I wasn’t impressed. Plus, some of the free versions make you have ads. Uh, no. I’m not putting up with ads in my email just to use their program. So I’ve been stumbling along, the email piling up unanswered inside Outlook 2007.

A couple of weeks ago, I upgraded to Office 2010. My hope was that Outlook 2010 would be more Patti friendly than 2007. It wasn’t. In fact, I like it even less than 2007 and that’s going some distance.

Do I go through the conversion process to use Live Mail and hope that I like it? There’s some question whether I can even convert unless OE is on the same computer, which rules this out. Or do I get out my Office 2003 disk and load Outlook 2003, which I like a lot better than 2007/2010? I’m not sure that Microsoft will let me do this. Or do I try to like Thunderbird? Which might not be possible.

My solution for now is to order Outlook 2010 for Dummies, hoping that if I can configure the program differently, I might remember I have email. I don’t know if this will work, but I have to try something. I can’t not answer people–that’s rude. Anyway, if you’re one of the people waiting for email from me, I’m sorry. Really sorry.

About a year and a half ago, I changed my ISP to get high speed internet. With all the researching I do online and the way I like to have pictures of everything, I was just wasting too much time waiting for pages to pull up on dial up. I hate the cost of high speed, but I was able to justify it by my usage of it as a writing tool. However, at the time I decided to retain my dial up ISP because 1) it would be back up in case my cable connection went down and 2) It would be a pain to change my email addresses everywhere.

I’ve come to the conclusion, though, that reason 1 is invalid. My cable connection rarely goes down, is never down long, and the two times it was down, I discarded the idea of using my dial up ISP because I couldn’t stand the wait times any more.

Reason 2 still stood, but I decided it was ridiculous to pay a monthly fee for something I don’t use anymore and haven’t used (except for email addresses) in probably a year. This meant it was time to start changing my email addresses and wean away from the old ISP to my newer one. It has been an incredible PITA, beyond what I expected.

First off, I should mention that I had 6 email addresses with my dial up ISP. At the time, I thought it was a good way to stay organized (it wasn’t) and I used a couple of them just to email stuff to myself on other computers. I was able to get rid of half those addresses rather easily. The remaining three…sigh.

One email address is the one I used primarily for retailer newsletters and for ordering stuff. I knew this one would be tough because there are retailers online where I used this address, but didn’t sign up for newsletters. I was going to have to remember all the places I used it. But I thought it would be simple to change the address for retailers who are sending me newsletters. I was wrong.

At the bottom of most every email is an unsubscribe link. Click it and you’re out. Very few of these newsletters have a link marked update your email address. Why not? Why do you make it easier for me to unsubscribe completely rather than just change my address?

So I go to their site and change my email address. That should take care of it, right? Not so much. I’ve had etailers continue to send me newsletters at my old address long after the period they said it would take to change. I’ve had them send me newsletters to both addresses long after the period they gave. I go back to make sure I changed the email address, and sure enough, I have.

The newsletter that came in this morning has been from one of the worst ones to deal with. There’s a link to update information. I clicked it, updated, and it looked fine. I then unsubscribed from all their newsletters because I didn’t want them and wasn’t reading them. I thought it was handled, but no. New newsletter was in my inbox this morning. It’s been a month, more than enough time to process my changes. I tried to handle it again.

Now I can’t log in at the site. My old email address gets an invalid warning, my new email address gets an invalid password warning, and when I try to get it reset, I don’t get any email from them. I’ve tried to click the unsubscribe link, but it tells me an error has occurred and that I should contact their customer service, but before I can click on the link it provides, the screen goes to the home page. What? Give me a chance to click the link! I’m not slow either, but by the time I read the message, the screen was updating.

Then there’s the newsletter I want that also had no way to update the email address. I figured I’d unsubscribe and then resubscribe again. Guess what? I can’t find any way on their site to subscribe to their newsletter. What are these people thinking?

It’s been an ordeal and I haven’t even notified most of my friends and acquaintances yet about the email change because I can’t get rid of the damn ISP until I can sort out my subscriptions anyway. It makes me wish I’d just used my Gmail address for everything and never gave any retailer my ISP address. It’s ridiculous and incredibly difficult to make the switch. What’s that slogan? The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer. Whoever said this never tried to change email addresses. It’s beyond impossible.

Email is making me crazy right now. Let’s totally leave Yahoo loop mail out of it because I’m ignoring that. I’m talking about plain, regular email. Over on MySpace, I finally turned on the Away feature on messages because I’ve got a queue of notes to answer and I have no clue when I’m going to get to them. At least I won’t have any new messages to worry about over there which is one step in the right direction.

Then there’s my personal email, the stuff coming in directly to me. Yesterday, I received a note from someone I was friendly with when we worked together. She left NWA, and when I tried to send her an Xmas email card, it bounced. Now I have her new email address and a really nice note from her that I’d like to answer. No time. I’m really, really slow at composing email.

Let’s not even mention all the notes I have from friends in my inbox. It’ll be a miracle if they’re all still my friends by the time I get around to replying to them.

Then there are the emails I’ve had to send. The ones that I get no reply to. These are all important notes–I wouldn’t have sent them if they weren’t–and I get nada back. This leaves me in a quandary. First, did my email even arrive? Spam filters, the note going astray in cyberspace, whatever. Second, if it did arrive, did they decide to answer it later? Did they decide it required no reply at all? (If so, they were wrong.) Are they on vacation? Is there some other reason why they’re not answering? Do I follow up at the risk of sounding like a complete pest? Did they reply and I didn’t receive their note? Gah!

I already took time to write the emails once, the last thing I want to do is have to keep following up, but I really, really need answers on a couple of them. I’m starting to obsess and I don’t have the energy for this.

I love email. Usually.