Heartbroken the soup discovered there was no replacing this faithful companion.
Soup needed a computer quickly and purchased a temporary HP from Staples. Win10 in all its gory. Also purchased a yearly MS package that includes Outlook, since this is to be a temporary computer.
All of the businesses that the soup have have been run sucessfully on Outlook for many years.
Outlook has been a centerpiece along with the trusty 11 year old LG Envy3 with customer lists.
Verizon is not going to continue to support the EV3 in the near future.
The Outlook connects to a Time warner Roadrunner account that soup has had since 1987. This is legacy stuff here.
Spectrum has taken over time warner and email is a red-headed stepchild. It doesn't really work. It takes half hour to many hours to receive emails sent to the accounts.
Soup has just discovered not only doesn't it work, but this version of outlook does not download the email files but instead works with them in the cloud. Bad stuff here.
Chickensoup is thinking that this is time for a complete overhaul of devices.
Chickensoup would like a private email that downloads onto the computer.
Chickensoup would like a computer that works well and fast. And is durable, this computer is cheesy. The soup actually takes the computer to work and other places. It has a 17 inch screen.
Chickensoup suspects she is going to have to find a Smart phone and have it all work togehter.
Privately.
Chickensoup is anti-google and anti-cloud.
Chickensoup would be happy to pay a place of her own.
Questions are 1) who do I hire to help me with this, I need someone with telephony skills and computer knowlege, and email skills. If that someone could set up a VPN I would be happy, God knows, I couldnt do it.
and 2) How can I get privacy and independence yet have them tie together.
Am I asking for too much?
Gratefully,
chickensoup
I only have some knowledge, but Protonmail is encrypted email and has a VPN means for free. It just matters how much data you use. They have two upgrades for cost with greater data availability.
I think you would need a local expert.
Suggest searching on the internet, then talk to them over the phone to find the right person.
Here is one option:
Hi Chickensoup. I am pinging a couple of wonderful FReepers who might be able to give you some help with this.
I use Outlook on the Web which I connect to with eM Client which downloads said emails to my local PC for storing and archiving. Outlook is what I use for business stuff, associate communications, vendor communications, and the like.
I use ProtonMail and VPN for private, family communications and do not download it since it stays encrypted in Switzerland.
I would start by deleting all the bloatware that came with the new pc. Then do a recovery disk. Then do updates.
That’s should take a couple of hours/. Then start personalizing.
Change from IMAP to POP3. Email will do what you are wanting.
pop-server.dc.rr.com
Install OpenShell and you wont mind windows 10. Will be almost like Win 7.
https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu/releases/download/v4.4.131/OpenShellSetup_4_4_131.exe
I hate outlook. It is a finicky b!tch. Consider Thunderbird and Opencard. Much more stable IMHO. Will import everything from Outlook and wasn’t written by a bunch of guys passing around a bong and saying I have a great idea, ribbons.
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/
You might end up liking that “temp” computer.
Soup needs to stop referring to itself in the third person. It’s creepy.
Sounds like a good time to switch to linux. FREE
Thunderbird is a good email client aka replacement for Outlook. Runs on windows, mac or linux. Thunderbird is made by Mozilla, same people as firefox so I don’t know if they steal data or not. There’s a few different email clients specifically for linux too. FREE
I use PIA (private internet access) for a VPN. I pay annually which works out to $3.50/mth.
I run used Thinkpads. Many of their models/series are designed and built for large corporate leases and they’re very reliable. I’m running a Thinkpad W530 right now. It has an Intel Core i7 - 2.70GHz processor and 16gb of ram and I haven’t been able to bog it down, even with graphics editing programs. It came with two 128GB SSD hard drives and win7 Pro preinstalled. I installed linux next to windows and can choose which one I want to start during computer startup. I paid $255.00 for it. It’s only got a 15.4 inch display. Something with a 17 inch would probably cost $300-350. T series, W series and P series, oldest to newest, are all “business class”. I opted for a high performance W series instead of going with the newer P series, mainly because I would have paid a higher price for the equivalent performance in a P series and the W530 I got originally came with Win7 so I knew it would run 7 well and I have no intention of running Win 8 or 10.
I use pretty much only linux on this particular laptop, I never get on windows. On another laptop and also a tablet I have, I run windows for a couple of programs that don’t have a linux equivalent. The windows side never connects to the internet though. All that gets done on the linux side as it’s safer. The viruses, malware, spyware etc are all written to attack windows machines as that’s what most people are running.
I’m running Linux Mint KDE Edition which sadly, they won’t be building anymore. Support runs out in 2021 but I could run it for a few years after that as updates will still be available. KDE has a program called KDE Connect for connecting to a smart phone and some other distrobutions aka flavors of linux have the same. FREE.
Another FREEper uses Zorin operating system which is linux made to look like windows.
For a new smart phone, you pretty much have two choices. Apple iPhone or an Android (made by google) based phone.
All phone apps want too many permissions to access different features of the phone(camera, microphone, etc and your personal data. No such thing as privacy with a smart phone but I think the iPhone is better about it than Andriod phones. The iPhone is pricey though.
I buy all my laptops used from ebay.
RE: IMAP vs POP email. Some email services only provide IMAP but even though the default is for the emails to be kept on a server somewhere, you can set it up to download them.
IF you really want privacy for email, you could get a domain name, like mychickensoupemail.com and set up an email address like soup@mychickensoupemail.com
At any rate, you can only encrypt outgoing email. You can’t encrypt an email that someone else is sending you, naturally. Even with that protonmail, both parties have to be using protonmail for emails back and forth to be encrypted. You can set up thunderbird or most any email client to send encrypted but it does take some setting up.
For all you want, you’re either going to have to have someone come to you or bring/send your computer to them as a lot of it needs to be done on the machine.
Linux also has MS Office compatible programs FREE. Equivalents of MS Word, MS Access, MS Excel etc. FREE
did I mention linux is FREE
Oh, you can put ubuntu touch(mobile aka phone OS) on a Nexus 5 phone but it’s a pretty techie thing to do.
https://ubports.com/devices/nexus5-convergence