A few months ago, my mom told me she could no longer open up Outlook Express. Turns out the email files were corrupted but after fiddling around and reading some support forums dedicated to the subject, I was able to re-import most of her mail and get the program back working. She continued to have weird issues with Outlook Express. I don’t know why it decided to act weird, nor could I get it back to working correctly so I told her that it was time to adopt an online email program. I opened up aGmail account for her and got her going. She called me not more than a day later telling me she hated Gmail because it doesn’t have an address book. RIDICULOUS! I drove home to show her how to access the address book only to find out my mom was right. Gmail doesn’t have an address book that you can access from the To: field. You must type the person’s name and then choose it. You can’t get a list of names. Okay, let’s try another email program. I registered her for a Yahoo account. Yahoo had an address book but there were so many ads and blinking icons– the interface was too busy. We deleted the account. How about AOL? Everyone and their mother uses AOL, it’s got to work. At first it seemed to be perfect. The interface wasn’t too overcrowded and she had an address book. She called me after 3 days to tell me that the Web site kept logging her out and wouldn’t let her log back in. I installed the AOL Toolbar and that seemed to fix that issue. She called me a couple days later to tell me that she although she’s able to stay logged in, she really hates AOL because she can’t seem to get links from email messages to open PLUS attachments refuse to open AND it’s dreadfully slow. My father told me I need to flush the online email idea down the toilet and get her an email program to install on her computer. Now I am madly trying to find an email application that isn’t Outlook Express that my mom will like.

Anyone have suggestions? Any ideas?