Browsers & email clients

[Richie Benauds Love Child]

Originally Posted by Ernest

Last time I had multiple windows opening, IE toolbars, it was caused my some type of malware, I tried Ad aware, Spy Bot, Bought Spyhunter, and it would not go away, I had to ask one of the pages to browse, I had to reload windows to get rid of it.
To be honest, just my personal thought, I dont like other toolbars like Yahoo, or Google with IE, I tried Yahoo once, I found it very invasive.
When your 20 odd windows open up, are they small like an unfolding pack of cards?.

Yep they are ern. All this has happened well after I had my yahoo tool bar. Could well be a windows problem, which could result in me reloading win98. Joy .

[Ernest]

Originally Posted by Zainub Razvi

I think you'll fiind Ernie, that the absolutely free ones available for download on the web are much more user friendly. Alternatively Netscape has a buit in pop up blocker.

True, but I got it with Spyhunter, to get rid of malware,or adware toolbars (nasty.
I find ignoring pop ups is best, because if you click to get rid of the things, they all mean open .

The hourly prize one is one of the worst, I clicked on X for it to go once, and it just kept opening in new windows.

[Ernest]

Originally Posted by Richie Benauds Love Child

Yep they are ern. All this has happened well after I had my yahoo tool bar. Could well be a windows problem, which could result in me reloading win98. Joy .

Yep it might be a windows problem, but it happened to me with Windows 98, one cause is adware as well, I had to reload, I tried every other remedy.

[Zainub]

Originally Posted by Richie Benauds Love Child

Yep they are ern. All this has happened well after I had my yahoo tool bar. Could well be a windows problem, which could result in me reloading win98. Joy .

Windown 98? U're still using that? May be a lot of your problems are just down to that. I don't know how I would survive without XP. I'm too spoiled. I need everything made very very easy.

[Rachael]

Originally Posted by Richie Benauds Love Child

Opera looked very quick but overly complicated

I routinely use several different browsers.. often running alongside one another on different sites. Opera works best for long-term browsing (I leave stacks up on it and select "continue from previous session" each time it opens.. but you can also save sessions: pretty flexible).

Firefox is next best.. and I use that for one off sites (visit and then forget).

IE is always there anyway... and comes in useful for about 1 site in every 200 where some peasant hasn't tested the code properly: I don't use it unless I absolutely have to (not least because it seems horribly old fashioned to manage without tabbed browsing).

On the e-mail front... I'd go with Thunderbird every time: fantastic package. You can set up multiple accounts.. and send under multiple identities (useful if you want to avoid span: don't give out you main identity unless you have to). It's a damn site less likely to be got by virus attack or such like. The message filtering is good.. and it's actually more of an equivalent to outlook than to ****** old outlook express.

You can do e-mail with Opera.. and I've one junk account set up on it: seems OK.. but I've not really tested it properly yet. I guess you could also use Eudora: suspect that's a decent package now but I've not used it in more than a decade.

[Richie Benauds Love Child]

With any luck I'll have a swanky new system at work in the summer (or at least a higher-ups old one) and it will be XP all the way ! Still stuck with IE though ....

[Ernest]

Originally Posted by Richie Benauds Love Child

With any luck I'll have a swanky new system at work in the summer (or at least a higher-ups old one) and it will be XP all the way ! Still stuck with IE though ....

With respect to Rachael, I know she uses Firefox, but IF was designed for use with Windows IMHP. I have no trouble now I have XP, I was always crashing windows 98.

Outlook Express I find OK, because it is easy to configure, if I have rouble which to be honest I do, I just delete the default and do it over, and it is OK.
You can have 8 accounts with outlook Express Rachael, 2 mailboxes with 7 aliases.

You can have Firefox ad IE as well, I think Rich, question is, which one would you make default.

[Richie Benauds Love Child]

Well I spent abit of time messing about with all the above, and came to these (slightly confused) conclusions.

Opera is a waste of time without a large amount of techie knowledge or you actually buy and get tech support. Blindingly quick. Email pants.

Firefox. Not bad. thunderbird wouldnt work with my work email account despite playing ball with the other ones. imported old emails OK Gave up.

IE6 & outlook express. Still ****ing me about despite numourous reloads.

Navigator 7.0- firefox/thunderbird in wolfs clothing ?? tabbed browser (good) confusinng cookie manger (bad). Quite quick (not opera quick) dont know about security and other important stuff. Spanky mail package too, imported settings which all work, but imported emails miles away and pretty hard to get at. Might take some getting used to. BUT IT DONT CRASH !!!!! unlike all of the above to a greater or less degree. Gets the RBLC seal of approval.

[Rachael]

Originally Posted by Richie Benauds Love Child

Opera is a waste of time without a large amount of techie knowledge or you actually buy and get tech support. Blindingly quick. Email pants.

Um... what don't you get? Run setup and use: end of story!

Seriously... the fancy extras (klike e-mail) might take a bit of exploring.. but the basic browser is no more difficult to use than IE or Firefox.

Originally Posted by Richie Benauds Love Child

Firefox. Not bad. thunderbird wouldnt work with my work email account despite playing ball with the other ones. imported old emails OK Gave up.

There's no POP3 account that Thunderbird wil not handle: if you use a Microsoft hotmail account then of course THAT will not work with anything normal because Microsoft are a bunch of complete ***** who (like AOL) like to screw you around.... but ANY pop3 mail server will work with Thunderbird - it's a great client.

Stick with it: knocks spots off the competition.

Originally Posted by Richie Benauds Love Child

IE6 & outlook express. Still ****ing me about despite numourous reloads.

You shouldn't really have trouble running IE and outlook express on Windows 98 if you've downloaded the right versions and if you have first run every single microsoft update imaginable.. but do bear in mind that Windows 98 was obsolete before they released it - and has been going down ever since.

Win 98 was designed to cater for home users who had old DOS or Windows 3.1 stuff that they didn't want to replace: instead of building a decent OS (or marketing Windows NT to home users) Microsoft created a **** fudge - continued to this day with Windows XP Home.

Bear in mind that Outlook Express is a Microsoft "freebie"... it's Outlook with all the useful bits removed.. and running on a crumy proprietorial database structure that is a complete pain in the ***... and is the favourite target of every other deranged hacker on the planet.

Originally Posted by Richie Benauds Love Child

Navigator 7.0 [...] Might take some getting used to. BUT IT DONT CRASH !!!!!

Netscape Navigator was great for several years... far, far better than IE. Alas, I fear that all went out the window when they were bought by AOL: no direct experience myself by the first google page I looked up had an extended rant about the sorry fate of the once great browser.

Think is.. unless you're desperately short of space you should be able to run opera and firefox as browsers and Thunderbird AND OE as mail clients without any problem whatsoever: set OE to leave a copy of all messages on your mail server and Thunderbird to download everything (or vice-versa) and you'll have the best of both worlds :-)

[Ernest]

Well Rachael you have some points here, Oh and despite Microsofts best efforts, they still NEED to use DOS even in XP, a lot of people swear by Windows 98, still popular with some, but I found it was not robust enough.

There is a feature in Windows 98, I got this from Blueyonder tech support, I had trouble with IE, but you can command it to repair itself, not sure how to do it now.

You are right, Rich could have Firefox and IE at the same time, and leave IE as his default browser if he liked, IE is better with the Int Options.

I had the same trouble with 98 as Rich, multiple IE pages, or tool bars, not in the main a windows problem that, it is over 50/50 adware or malware, I have been there, you can tell by the way the small pages fan out, only cure resoft his windows.