Zaphod
06-24-2009, 12:51 AM
For the past many years, my parents used AOL. For various reasons I was never able to get them off AOL and onto the 'real' internet, until now. The planets aligned and they now have cable internet and no longer have to hear that horrific modem squawk!
Anyway, that's all beside the point. I'm just venting from a very frustrating 'migration' dinner (that would be me going to the parents house for dinner and trying to teach them how to use iGoogle after I had finished copying all the stuff they had in AOL to an iGoogle account). I know, silly me! What became achingly obvious after sitting there for a few hours was that they simply will not 'get it'. I might as well been speaking Swahili and showing them 3-D time travel schematics for all they were going to understand. So, I ultimately said the hell with it and promptly opened up the AOL software and logged them back into AOL (At least it is faster now with them on cable!) and told them we would have to work over the next few months to migrate them s...l...o...w...l...y to iGoogle or something.
So, my game plan is to still get them off AOL, especially now that they are paying comcast for cable and AOL for internet, and onto the 'regular' internet. But, after really watching them struggle with iGoogle, I realized they really need dedicated apps for what they want. The core app being email of course.
So I come to the point of all this (bah, gimme a break, I don't post all that often and I'm just feeling chatty right now! lol) What email client would you recommend based on the following:
- It must be stoopid dirt simple to use.
- It should be free. Although that is not a deal breaker, just prefer free.
That's it. I'll do all the config and what not, so they won't have to worry about any of that. I did do a quick search and came up with pawpawmail.com. Based on the screenshots, that is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for from an end-user perspective. But of course I'm looking for free and I'm not overly keen on the "management" aspect of pawpawmail. (the idea is that you would be the manager and they would be the user. you setup their address book and they can only receive email from the people in their address book or that you approve. The last thing I want to do is 'manage' their email, they've been doing fine with this aspect of email for several years.)
So, anything? Oh, one of the quick searches I did turned up something called simplemail! Hey, let me give that a shot! I downloaded it, ran it, and laughed! It was....exactly what the title implied. It is nothing more than a very simple pop3 quick mailer. It opens a single window into which you type your pop3 server name, user ID, password and click connect. That's it. Hard to describe, but it is basically for someone that needs to send a quick email to someone and there isn't an email client available. But it defintely WAS NOT what I was looking for! lololol
Thanks for reading the ramblings!
Anyway, that's all beside the point. I'm just venting from a very frustrating 'migration' dinner (that would be me going to the parents house for dinner and trying to teach them how to use iGoogle after I had finished copying all the stuff they had in AOL to an iGoogle account). I know, silly me! What became achingly obvious after sitting there for a few hours was that they simply will not 'get it'. I might as well been speaking Swahili and showing them 3-D time travel schematics for all they were going to understand. So, I ultimately said the hell with it and promptly opened up the AOL software and logged them back into AOL (At least it is faster now with them on cable!) and told them we would have to work over the next few months to migrate them s...l...o...w...l...y to iGoogle or something.
So, my game plan is to still get them off AOL, especially now that they are paying comcast for cable and AOL for internet, and onto the 'regular' internet. But, after really watching them struggle with iGoogle, I realized they really need dedicated apps for what they want. The core app being email of course.
So I come to the point of all this (bah, gimme a break, I don't post all that often and I'm just feeling chatty right now! lol) What email client would you recommend based on the following:
- It must be stoopid dirt simple to use.
- It should be free. Although that is not a deal breaker, just prefer free.
That's it. I'll do all the config and what not, so they won't have to worry about any of that. I did do a quick search and came up with pawpawmail.com. Based on the screenshots, that is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for from an end-user perspective. But of course I'm looking for free and I'm not overly keen on the "management" aspect of pawpawmail. (the idea is that you would be the manager and they would be the user. you setup their address book and they can only receive email from the people in their address book or that you approve. The last thing I want to do is 'manage' their email, they've been doing fine with this aspect of email for several years.)
So, anything? Oh, one of the quick searches I did turned up something called simplemail! Hey, let me give that a shot! I downloaded it, ran it, and laughed! It was....exactly what the title implied. It is nothing more than a very simple pop3 quick mailer. It opens a single window into which you type your pop3 server name, user ID, password and click connect. That's it. Hard to describe, but it is basically for someone that needs to send a quick email to someone and there isn't an email client available. But it defintely WAS NOT what I was looking for! lololol
Thanks for reading the ramblings!