There are many of us (myself included) who remember the days when dial-up was the only way to get online, and there were two types of ISPs, the Corporate and the Mom n’ Pop.

A few examples from when I was living in Connecticut:

The locals were NECAnet and Cyberzone. The corporates were SNET and TIAC. All of them cost about the same price per month.

(As a small side note before continuing, CompuServe is officially no more. For those interested in ISP history, that’s a good read.)

The links to the ISPs above are all from The Internet Archive because not a single one of them exists any longer. Each was bought out/acquired, shuffled around a few times and either dissolved or merged into a larger ISPs customer base.

I’m sure more than a few of you out there can name off at least three ISPs from the late 1990s/early 2000s that are no more.

As to the question of whether a true Mom n’ Pop ISP still exists, the answer is yes, they do. And wow, did I find a doozy for my example.

BEHOLD… Spitfire Communications

• We’re greeted with a home page that has 3 different fonts and looks like it was designed in 1997. The title of the page is "Home". That’s it.
• The Downloads page lists software that is literally 10 or more years old. You can download AIM 5.1! Or ICQ 2000b!
• On the How Do I? page, every link for modem help is dead.
• Want to pay a bill online? You can’t. The Pay Online page links to a site that’s dead.

If you thought your ISP was behind the times.. well.. I dare you to find one more antiquated than Spitfire.

I’m sure Spitfire is a fine dial-up ISP, but you can’t deny the dinosaur-era site design and plethora of dead links.

This, unfortunately, is how most Mom n’ Pop ISPs are today. Woefully behind the times. Web sites antiquated beyond belief. And they probably accept payments in doubloons for all I know.

Do you use a Mom n’ Pop ISP or know someone that does?

Tell us your tale.

This is written for the benefit of those who use the Hotmail webmail service. If your e-mail address ends in @msn.com, @live.com or @hotmail.com or you use Windows Live Domains, this applies to you.

POP-based Hotmail is not available in the free version at the time of this writing and I’ll say that right up front. You need to flip over $19.95 a year to get that feature currently. Yes, this turns off a lot of people (considering Gmail offers the same ability for free) but if you want the POP you gotta do it.

So let’s say you go ahead and do that. What are the server names you need to use to get to the goods?

This is what they are:

POP3 incoming server: pop3.live.com
Secure required: Yes
Port: 995

SMTP outgoing server: smtp.live.com
Secure required: No
Port: 25

How to login: Use your Windows Live ID (i.e. your e-mail address) and your existing mail password.

Will POP access ever be available in the free version?

Microsoft has said they "have plans" to do so. So watch for it. For now, you have to pay for POP if you use Hotmail.

This tutorial will instruct you how to do one of the following (depending on which e-mail you like best):

• POP to Hotmail (including Sent Mail and folders)
• POP to Gmail (including Sent Mail and folders)

It’s easy enough to move everything in the inbox to a Hotmail or Gmail account. But what’s more important is your sent mail and mail you have stored in separate folders. There are many instances where you will need to get access to this, and without the ability to move everything, the move simply isn’t worth it. Continued

One widely unknown feature of Outlook Express and the Windows Live Mail client is how easy it is to backup your mail locally (to which you can then burn to CD/DVD, put on a USB stick, etc.) Even if you’re not using Hotmail, you can easily back up any POP or IMAP account by a simple drag’n'drop to a local folder. You could even backup Gmail easily using the WLmail client.

See video below for details.

A while back I got some questions about how to *exactly* set up e-mail with Opera so I decided to put together a video showing how it’s done. Some people aren’t aware that the e-mail client within Opera isn’t too shabby (it does OperaMail, POP and IMAP). See video below for details.