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Vintage Mac Living

The Trials and Tribulations of Email on Vintage Macs

- 2005.11.15

I must admit that I don't usually use my oldest machines for sending and receiving email, but today I decided to.

I wanted to send in some screen shots to go along with my last article, and I figured since I was using the PowerBook 170 to take the screen shots anyway, why not use it to send them to Dan Knight?

I fired up my trusty PowerBook 170 with my old Global Village TelePort Bronze modem (normally I just connect to the Internet via LocalTalk, but I wanted to see if the old modem still worked).

First I tried my using my Qwest account. Eudora Lite 1.3.1 got as far a saying it was trying to connect to the server, sat there, and then said that the connection had failed.

I said to myself, "All right, I've had problems with Qwest's email service before." Then I went to Google to find a free POP3 email account for myself.

First I tried bluebottle.com. I got the account and sent an email to myself using the PowerBook. The email was sent just fine. The trouble started when I wanted to receive that email.

It got to "Logging into the POP server" and then the following error message came up:

"There has been an error transferring your mail. I said: PASS And the POP server said: -ERR [AUTH] Invalid login"

I looked at the configuration, typed in everything again, and the same thing happened.

So I went over to my Beige G3 to try it in Entourage, and it worked fine.

Okay, I'll try another free POP3 service.

This time I tried 1net.gr. I got the account and tried it on the PowerBook. The same thing happened with the 1net.gr account!

I tried it on the G3, and it worked fine.

Okay, now I was starting to get frustrated!

I decided to give it one more shot - third times a charm right?

This time I tried emailacc.com. Again, I tried this on the PowerBook running Eudora Lite 1.3.1, and guess what? It got as far as "Logging into the POP server." And it just sat there until it finally said it lost the connection to the server.

Again, I tried it on the G3, and it worked fine.

The PowerBook works fine when it comes to sending email, but not receiving it - that just doesn't make since.

It still works fine when it comes to surfing the Web with a text browser, but for how much longer?

What kind of a world is this when you can't even get your email with an old machine? I know the PowerBook is more than willing, but I guess those fat cats that run all of the free POP3 services figure old machines are worthless, so why let them even log in?

I for one am tired of people telling me that I can't even use my older machine for email. Those of us who use older machines need to take a stand and say that we are tired of all of the forced obsolescence crap.

Our machines may be old, but they are far from useless. It's time the world accepts that.

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