I'm also not sure I'll be able to use the Mozilla e-mail client. When I was attempting to configure it earlier, I saw something in the instructions about the options I want not being available when you have a POP3 service, which is what I'm getting from Chiconet. If it turns out that I can't get e-mail delivered directly to my hard drive, I'm going to be very cross. (My kindergarten teacher used to say that. If you children don't behave yourselves, I shall become very cross with you. I always thought she talked funny.) But it looks as though I might be reduced to trying Outlook Express, although I don't know if even that will do what I want.
All I want is to get my LJ notifications! If Juno had not decided to block all the e-mail from the LiveJournal servers, I wouldn't be going through all this hassle. What on earth would make them do such a stupid thing? The people who run Juno have the brains of dust bunnies.
Well, at least the new Internet service is working well. It is considerably more stable than Juno, and most of the time I get a connection right away. And, unlike Juno, I don't have to open their home page every time I connect to the Internet. (It is a peculiar feature of Juno that you are required to open their page, which usually takes at least fifty seconds, before you can begin opening other pages.) I do miss the clock that is in the task bar of the Juno browser, which shows how long you have been connected to the Internet. Other than that, IE is about as good -- or (more accurately) mediocre.
But I grow weary of all these dealings with digital gadgetry. I can only play geek for so long, and then I turn surly. A good grasp of the workings of technology has never been one of my traits, and a capacity for anxiety certainly is. In my moments of greatest frustration, I sometimes imagine myself the subject of newspaper stories with headlines such as "Madman Slays Dozens with AOL Disks: Blames Internet." Give me back my e-mail, you Gods of technology! Don't drive me to kill!