Outlook Express / Identities / Accounts

[pafilafika]

Any help would be greatly appreciated:

I'm struggling with Outlook Express.

I'm trying to get each different login account in XP (one for each of my family members) to see their individual email messages from their individual email accounts. We recently got Verizon DSL and we are new to the XP OS as well.

After subscribing to Verizon DSL and accessing my top-level account I created several email sub-accounts (you are allowed up to 9).

Somehow you also have a choice of either 1) leaving all your email out on the Verizon website email server or 2) having an email managing program like Outlook Express take it in automatically to your PC for you to see/manage within Outlook Express.

I'm not sure how/where this choice is made or how you can change it if you wanted to. The drawback to 2) it appears is that you cannot read your verizon email from work, for example, on the verizon website because it gets moved to your home PC as it comes in.
Somehow my settings got set for (2), I'm not sure how.
I'm thinking of going back to (1) if I can learn how to do it.

Even so, if I try to make things work in Outlook Express on my PC at home there is a separate set of issues: (Isn't there always)

There is an ability to define several "Identities" in OE and to switch Identities.
There is also an ability to define several "accounts" and to define an individual email for each account.
However, there appears to be no instruction anywhere (anywhere I have searched so far) on how to link or associate an identity with an account.
After pondering this question a bit, I think an account is automatically associated with the identity your in when you define the account, but again nowhere does it actually *say* this.

There appears to be a missing technote on how to do this...
i.e. manage the whole OE-identitiy/OE-account/XP-login thingy.

There is a technote (on Verizon's website) on how to create several email accounts in Outlook Express.
But when one creates several such accounts, this causes all email messages for all defined accounts to be received by one person i.e. the identity you were in when you created the accounts.

Now this can be useful if you have several email accounts like one at yahoo.com and one at hotmail.com, etc. that you want to funnel into outlook into a single identity.

But back to my real problem: I think that rather than defining all accounts in my identity, I need to define several identities in OE and then define one account in each identity.
But I haven't tried this (a bit gun shy at this point I guess; tired too.) and I'm not sure this will work. Help with this issue please?

Then there's the issue of being able to see what you need to from any OS login in XP.

Needless to say all this is quite frustrating and definitely NOT intuitive.

It's rather sad, but the average guy trying to set up his PC for home use with several logins in XP, each with their separate email
gets the feeling that you almost need a degree in IT to resolve this stuff.

Is it me? It's them, right?
(Martin Short as Nathan Thurm SNL mid '80's)

Again, any help/comments would be greatly appreciated.

Rick
(pafilafika)

[Play_The_0dds]

i hate outlook and outlook express, i set my kids up accounts through msn's free service on the msn explorer(butterfly icon) select no to the first two options if you have not opened it before, so you wont be signing up for the paid internet service. then create a free account for each person you want to have one. benifits to this:1, they scan all your mail for virus before it comes to your computer 2,can sign up with a fake name and zip code , in case you have to dump the account for personal reasons. 3, if your computer dies and all is lost, log in to msn mail from any computer and all your mail is still in the box on any computer. 4,if you change internet providers, dont have to change email addresses with all your friends and contacts. i could name a few more reasons, but thats basically my two cents worth.