Flexible Web Services Info Tech Support

I had a client this morning who suddenly wasn't able to get his Verizon dot net emails. For many years the old settings worked fine, but suddenly yesterday at 8:50 AM or so, he was getting errors and requests to correct this username and password. Of course, the messages was from his Outlook email client that he used to get his mail from the POP email server and Outlook is notorious for giving erroneous error messages. I did a little research and it turns out that Verizon has apparently changed where the original hosts addresses are pointing or disabled those settings altogether. The only clue Outlook provided was that the password was wrong. 

The settings for Verizon changed. The original incoming server was incoming.verizon.net and port 110. (This appears to still be the same address for IMAP accounts, but changed for POP accounts). That changed to pop.verizon.net and we had to turn on SSL with port 995.

The outgoing mail server was outgoing.verizon.net and port 25 (which as always been a problem on Verizon networks, they block port 25, but apparently not for their own mail clients). That changed to smtp.verizon.net also with SSL enabled on port 465.

The username and password worked fine after those adjustments were made. This also included his phone. Modifying the settings to match his email client and the phone was able to send and receive also.

I've been doing some previewing of Windows 10 and I've been very impressed so far. The Technical preview had very poor performance, but I installed the latest preview on a PC that was originally configured for Windows Vista. It had 3G memory and I dropped a used 500G hard drive into it. The performance was exceptional. I even installed a graphically intense game to test the performance and while it was marginal, I was still impressed because the PC didn't really have enough RAM and the video card was stock and of course the CPU was old and out of date.

One of the features that I liked about Windows 10 was the start button menu is back (sort of), or at least parts of it are. The most recently used apps still show in the Metro mode (panels instead of a list.. I'm thinking panels are much easier to touch with your finger than a list of fine print options), but the menu allows you to navigate the programs much like Windows 7 or Vista. In Windows 8, with the missing start button, my desktop started getting cluttered with programs that I use most often. The Metro panels never really caught on with me and even on a laptop with a touch screen, I rarely if ever touched the screen.

With the free upgrade being offered by Microsoft for Windows 7 and Windows 8 users, It's a great opportunity to take advantage of the new technologies and I can't see any real down sides (except as noted below). See this link for more information on the free upgrade. It won't be available for download until later this year, but Windows 8 users will get a lot out of the upgrade. Windows 7 users my still be reluctant because a lot of features that Windows users have come to love are already there.

One other thing I noticed. Internet Explorer is dead. It's been replaced by Edge which seems to get it's name from the browser using all the windows space to display internet content; meaning the browser fills all the way out to the edge of the window. In full screen mode, there'd be no border. I still prefer Chrome to Microsoft's browser, so I didn't get to really use the new browser much. I struggled for a bit to figure out how to enter a web site. It appears that they have taken the frequent habit of most users who enter the web site they want in the search box instead of the address bar, so there isn't an address bar, per se. In fact, there isn't a place to type on when you open edge (which I could only seem to do from the Metro panel, which isn't gone). You open your web sites in the search function and it will determine if what you want is on the web or on the computer (or both??). My struggles ended when I figured out how to get Chrome installed where I can once again have my address bar.

I'm wondering how radical of a change this will be for web sites that are engineered to work with Internet Explorer. Browsers will inform web sites what browser and browser version they are. Many web sites utilize this information to deliver content or not deliver it and on some of them, they look for the IE and they use a > (greater than) the version, where they don't support IE 8 or 9, but do support 10 or 11, but if the new browser doesn't even report IE, then it doesn't matter what version because these web sites won't even recognize the browser, much less that version. One thing is for sure, you won't be using any version of IE prior to 11 on Windows 10. When Microsoft kills a app (like Outlook Express and the start menu), they kill it permanently.