My life is an odd mixture of yesteryear and today as far as technology goes. Give me a moleskine notebook any day to jot down my to-do list, but yet at the same time, I love my Blackberry. I don't expect anybody to understand it. I hardly understand it myself. But the system seems to work. And that leads to one of my latest battles with technology: email programs.
I don't like the feel of webmail. And for many years, I got along fine using Outlook Express. But for the longest time, it wasn't set up to sync with smartphones, so I was forever keying contact information into two areas, and that's never a good thing.
So, I upgraded to Outlook and hated it beyond words. I have nearly two gigs of RAM in my computer, but Outlook still doesn't run seamlessly on it. And don't even get me started on the "To" field in Outlook. If somebody changes his email address, good luck getting the "To" field to recognize the change that you put into the address book (yeah, I know, I figured out that Outlook doesn't use the address book...here's a crazy question--why not?).
So I ditched that program and began using Windows Live Mail--the new Outlook Express. A word to the those who are thinking about using that particular program. Don't. You'll end up with a different inbox for every email address you have. It has an "All Inbox" feature but all of the email in it disappears every time you delete a storage folder. All you have to do is go into the regedit file and delete the HKCU\Software\Microsoft\ Windows Live Mail\SearchFolderVersion folder every time it happens. Yeah, right. I did it once and it was enough to cause me to run back to Outlook Express.
And ironically, Blackberry software now allows users to sync their contacts with Outlook Express. I won't be giving up again on this program any time soon. Funny how you try to roll with the times and upgrade to keep up will all the changes, only to realize that what you started with was better than all the upgrades.
