* Charlie Tame:
TS Mathews wrote:
Any and every time I've hit "catch up" the program has failed and given
me the prompt to the effect, "I can restart or go to the internet to try
to find a solution." Restarting simply takes me back to where I was
with the additional prompt beforehand for me to setup an e -mail account.

It didn't happen once, or on occasion, it happened each and every time I
moved to a new newsgroup until, after the sixth time, I decided that if
it didn't work any better than that, I'd try Windows Live Mail Desktop.

Tim:
My advice is to use Thunderbird. I don't like Windows Mail or WLMD.
I experienced some of the same issues you have. I gave up and moved on
to a better newsreader. That's all I use Thunderbird for, like you I use
Outlook for email. I couldn't imagine having to put up with Windows Mail
for email... it is a lightweight POS, and should still be in beta testing and
not part of a major OS release.

Both work together on this machine (Vista 64) and on Vista 32 but both
are slow and unreliable compared to Thunderbird.

Hey, Charlie!

I agree about Thunderbird. I tried to like Windows Mail, and the
only thing I used it for was newsgroups. I gave up and switched
to Thunderbird, a much better experience.

I tried WLMD and found it to be buggy, too. Although, that was a
few months back. However, I'm not fond of the adware based concept
of WLMD and will stick to using TB as my newsreader.

Outlook Express was also considerably slower. It's obviously not a
server issue since it's the same server, but perhaps to do with the way
some of the data is accessed or the database model used by MS.

While Outlook Express had its own issues, I thought it worked just fine
for newsgroups... at least for what I needed. Since I've been using Outlook
so long for email, I can't really offer too much opinion on OE or WinMail's
email reliability.... for newsgroups, especially, busy newsgroups- it's awful.

As for setting it as default I think that should be possible but can't
give a definite answer, sorry.

Should not be a problem at all.


Take care,

Michael