"OE was discontinued ages ago. Outlook is much more than an email program."

That explains a lot. I too still use OE6 under XP: on getting a W10 machine I switched to it as much as I could, but with e-mail came unstuck as the first thing I was asked to do was to open a "Microsoft account". Why, for heaven's sake? E-mails are between me and my ISP, MS have nothing to do with it.

I ought to change to a more up-to-date email program, but I find OE6 satisfactory (apart from being infuriatingly slow in compressing archives), and I don't want to lose the archives - can any IE ex-user advise if they're importable by other e-mail software?