Today's Question Everything is....

If Mozilla's Thunderbird email program really is free and open source, then why
are these hustlers from Gandi.net and Hover.com using it as a platform to grab ten or twenty dollars from the unsuspecting rubes who simply want to send dear old Grandma an email message to make sure their inheritance is still alright?

Why would anyone pay for a new email address when Microsoft's Outlook will let you create up to ten different aliases per year for your Outlook account, which can then be used as new and different email addresses, and all of them will let you access your account, using your original password....

So don't be fooled by those nefarious scammers and flimflam artists - do your homework and take advantage of the free help Microsoft is offering you. And don't pay anybody for another email address until you try these freebies.

And while I'm yapping about Thunderbird's once-wonderful email program, I'd just like to tell you that I'm so old I can remember what it was like before it was 'improved' beyond recognition. That was back in the good old days, before nine out of ten users started bitching about it. Those selfless coders so heavily involved in their make-work project ought to read their fan mail more often. Especially the part that says "If it works, don't fix it!" All the frills in the world aren't going to help if we can't get it going, or if that takes us three days. And I refer here particularly to the configuration of the incoming and outgoing servers and the disgustingly inaccurate 'automatic' process for that. If I have to do it all manually, then don't distract me with your dazzling but useless automatic setup.