My e-mail account with Orange just gets worse and worse: I use Outlook to manage emails and I have no problem receiving them. But for the last two years attempts to send emails often fail. It has reached the stage where no emails seem to go. I have checked and re-checked the settings (if the settings were wrong it would never work and never would have worked) but I can’t find a fault and think it is to do with Orange’s server. (try using their website – you’ll probably find yourself in agreement.
I don’t want to change my email because it is an identifier on soooo many different accounts and it will cause problems but it has reached a stage where I have no choice. Choices are more limited than one might think; There are certain accounts, eg AOL or Hotmail where you might be treated as spam, or popular providers where I would end up with a name and a number that I would never remember eg jamescorr10538@commonasmuck.com. And importantly it needs to be a “POP” provider so that I can communicate through a client application eg Outlook. There are many free accounts, but not so many offering this service.
I thought I found a solution with Lycos – one of the earlier big names in the Web who seems to have been severely relegated since the advent of Google. Perhaps this is why:
After establishing that I would get the name that I wanted I tried to set up an account. Part of the process demands a “significant question” to which you have registered an answer that can be used to verify your identity at a later stage. So far so reasonable.
But the point of this question is that the answer must be real, so that you don’t have to ‘remember’ the answer…you just know it. Except that Lycos has predefined a number of questions rather than let you make up your own (still not a major problems) BUT then set restrictions on the answers.
I don’t have a partner and I don’t have a pet so I can’t pick those questions. I could go for mother’s maiden name or father’s name…but Lycos insist that the answer have six letters or more! Unfortunately my ancestors’ didn’t anticipate stupid password restrictions at some point eighty years in the future and left me with a taxonomic legacy that fails to meet Lycos’ minimum requirement of word length. So I can’t use that option either. (In fact even if I went for the pet option I would fail on Bobby, Betty, Scamp and Stug).
The last option was “where was your last holiday?” Let’s think about this for a minute…my last holiday was probably Florence. Seems straightforward enough till you project forward a year or two to some point where I am having an account problem, am trying to access my settings and cannot go any further until I answer “where was your last holiday.” If things go well I will have had a tremendous number of holidays by then and will not remember the last holiday that I would have had at the point in the past when I set up the account!
So I won’t bother with those morons. This may seem a bit of an overreaction but I want to make sure that I get an efficient account that works now and will continue to work for some years. I will even pay for a decent email account if it comes to it. But I take this incompetence at the very first gate as an indication of what I am likely to find all the way through. Is this an indication of why Lycos dropped from Premier league in the nineties to Sunday irregular?
