Have you ever tried to change your email address? I've had a Hotmail email address for nearly 20 years, and a secondary on Gmail for three or four years. But the Hotmail address was my primary address, especially after my work email address was canceled. Heaven forbid the school district should support retirees' email! [In fact, it was cancelled at noon on my last day of work. Good thing I had already forwarded everything and sent a file of contacts to my home address.]

Recently Hotmail has been taken over by Outlook. I used Outlook at work, so I thought it would be just fine, not a problem, when I clicked OK to convert my Hotmail to Outlook. I'm an "early adopter" and I didn't wait till it was mandatory.

Holy Toledo, Batman! What a steaming pile of noxious horse excrement! Lost emails, confusing to/from/reply indicators. Outlook clearly doesn't do the simple job of email at all well--I think they tried to be clever with something that is pretty straightforward. Tried to re-invent the wheel.

So I've notified everyone I could think of about my new -- well, not new but newly primary -- Gmail address. It's going to be a pain to reconstruct the contact list, but little by little, I'll do it. I'm not that terribly fond of Gmail, either, but it's way better than Outlook.

What's so darned difficult about doing a simple task in a straightforward manner? I guess it would put programmers out of work.