Jon -

You're right, that technically I should probably have referred to the http protocol. For whatever reason, MSN, despite containing "Microsoft" in it's genealogy, seems determined to be incompatible with as many Microsoft programs as possible. The have been complaining for several years that "MSN does not support POP3 mail," but until recently have managed to live with it. A week or so ago, they arbitrarily, without asking consent or giving any warning, moved our account to a new http server. We did, in fact, have to call MSN support to find out why nothing worked. It's a One-Way move, and cannot be returned to the former setup. Now they will have to change their complaint to "MSN does not support Outlook Express." The "new" MSN service looks EXACTLY like hotmail, and we suddenly have the same spam and virus "presence" on our MSN account that we previously saw only on our junk hotmail account(s).

You're also correct that I could modify and add to my own systems to "compensate." It looks a lot easier (so I'm a foolish optimist) to just find another email service that I can trust ... working on it.

Maybe the new beta Gmail POP3 is worth checking out.(?)

John