Issue: Microsoft Outlook Won't Send or Receive Email

This is a very common issue that I hear almost every week from various family and friends. Usually it's from people who are old or simply out of it. The problem is usually due to the email server not working properly, or a bad configuration in the Outlook email client.

Effective Solution: I tell the victim to uninstall Outlook and move to webmail, such as Gmail or Yahoo. There are so many reasons why you should not be using Outlook. A few are:

• With Outlook, you are tied to the computer that has Outlook configured for your email services.
• If you go on a trip or out of town, you pretty much must bring your laptop that has Outlook configured on it.
• With Outlook, you have to configure too much stuff (inbound servers, outbound servers, username, password, etc.)
• You have to install Outlook.

Web-based email, such as Gmail and Yahoo, don't suffer any of the issues listed above. You simply log in, from ANY computer, from almost anywhere in the world, and it just works. Since Microsoft owns Hotmail, I generally to tell the Outlook victim not to use Hotmail.

If someone comes to me with this same issue twice, and they have neglected to migrate from Outlook to some web-based email service, I very plainly tell them I will no longer assist them with their email issues. Case closed. I don't have time to help people who don't listen to me.