On Wed, 2 Oct 2002 01:52:46 +1200 (NZST), Lin Nah wrote :

Having said all that, I will admit that I work for an ISP that sets up its customers on Outlook or OE. I think most of us know why that happens. If you don't you can email me for a longer spiel 8) Should we be doing more to educate our users? The answer would be yes. I would like to find out what other NZ ISPs are doing in this area with the hope of learning what works and what won't.

A small clarification, I nearly posted this yesterday but it didnt seem appropriate or required at the time... Im one of the helpdesk team at the ISP Lin also works for. Our helpdesk is familiar with Outlook Express but that doesnt mean we're close minded about it. We regularly support clients who use other mailing software and as long as the software is reasonably generic we manage. We dont force our clients to use OE, but we do suggest it to our clients *because its there*. The differentiation is important, and stereotyping against helpdesk types isnt going to help. We all start somewhere. :-) I run Eudora in Sponsored mode and find it more than adequate - never caught anything through that, and I have never run resident antivirus either. (I manually scan my system from time to time using F-Prot for DOS.) Prior to using Eudora I used Netscape Messenger (4.x) and found this was also pretty good, although the limitation to only one mailbox is what forced me to migrate. Now that Netscape 7 is out I may consider switching back soon.... I think most ISP helpdesks crewed by reasonable people will accept that their clients dont *have* to use Outlook Express, and the only reason they may encourage their clients to use it is that especially for the less-than- technically-savvy sort, OE is easy to setup, and provided with all versions of Windows from 98 upward. If you work for an ISP and you dont have support staff familiar with a broader range of email clients than Outlook and Outlook Express, I would seriously suggest some more training is in order: Eudora, Netscape Messenger and Pegasus come to mind as alternatives, but theres obviously a lot more. Mark. - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog