This will slightly speed up your retrieving and sending of email. First open Outlook Express and select tools - accounts, highlight your email account and select properties - select the server tab and write down what is in the two boxes for "incoming mail" (POP3) and outgoing mail (SMTP) i.e. mine is "pop.east.cox.net" and "smtp.east.cox.net". Now close all of that and select start run and type "cmd" (without the quotations) and hit enter, type - tracert (whatever was in your box for "incoming mail") i.e. for me - tracert pop.east.cox.net. It will then say "Tracing route to ......" followed by a DNS number, it will look something like 68.54.2.13 - write that number down. Do the same for your "outgoing mail" and write the number down. Now open up your email properties again as you did before and in the boxes for "incoming mail" (POP3) and "outgoing mail" (SMTP) put in the DNS numbers you wrote down for each. That's it, your done. This will keep your email from looking up the DNS number (because it already knows it) everytime you check or send mail thus speeding it up a bit.