- 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. 
