outlook classic 2019 saved a yahoo mail account
If I wasn't such a nerd when it comes to email, a bunch of email would probably have been lost forever.
In an ultra rare instance where I actually helped somebody out with a computer problem thing, I successfully moved about 13.5 gigs of email off a Yahoo Mail account so it could become usable again. Yes, this was saving a Yahoo mail account for somebody else since I moved off all web-based email a long time ago.
For years, Yahoo had a 1TB storage limit for email. Recently, Yahoo said there will be no more free 1TB of storage and now the free limit is 20GB. Yahoo also of course says sure, you can get your 1TB back if you want, but now you have to pay for it.
The goal was to not pay that toll, so it was time to figure out how to download a mail backup and then free up space on the Yahoo mail account so it could continue to be usable.
I'm sitting in front of this person's computer, which had a standard Windows 11 installation. Right. Now I have to figure out how to download the mail and back it up locally. Right. Now I'm thinking okay, Windows must come with some kind of email client. I look around and I see two Outlooks. One that's some "new" web-based thing, and another, Outlook Classic from 2019. Outlook Classic appears to support local accounts, which is what I wanted. Sounds good to me, I'll use this.
This is where things temporarily got bad.
In order to download mail from a Yahoo account to a mail client, an "app password" must be generated on the Yahoo side. I go to do this, but I'm getting all sorts of warnings and that phone authentication is required. The person who had this Yahoo account was nearby, I told them to get their phone so I can get that stupid separate app password set up. After some juggling around between the computer and the phone, the app password is generated. Okay, good.
I'm successfully able to get the Yahoo mail account working in Outlook 2019, but hold on there, cowboy, we're not done yet. Not even close.
Now I have to figure out a way to set up a local way to store email so I can actually, y'know, back it up.
This is where the real nightmare happened, because wow, what a process. In order to actually set up a local place to store mail, it required setting up a local PST. That in itself wasn't a big deal, but finding where to do it was where the actual nightmare was. Teeny tiny menu options spread all over Outlook Classic. It was not that different from how mail used to be set up a quarter century ago. Remember Windows 2000? Remember Office 2000? That was the experience, and I'm not exaggerating. It was like I was dealing with email in the early 2000s all over again, except with a modernist Windows UI. Weird. I plodded on.
Okay, I finally get a local PST set up. One file, and I plop it right on the desktop so I know where it is.
Done yet? Nope.
Turns out this person's PC was low on space, and I'm about to synchronize many gigs of email from Yahoo locally. I ask the person I'm doing this backup for if they have an external drive or USB stick I can move files to. They have one. I move a bunch of stuff off the computer, reclaimed the space, and now there's about 55GB free of local space to use. Good.
But we're STILL NOT DONE.
Outlook Classic is now downloading/synchronizing all the email off that Yahoo mail account, and that's not fast even with the fastest of internet connections. I said okay, just leave this computer on overnight and hopefully all the mail will be synchronized tomorrow.
Tomorrow comes.
I go to the computer, check Outlook Classic vs. Yahoo mail to make sure the number of emails match up, which was also a minor nightmare because getting the total number count of emails is annoying to acquire for both Yahoo and Outlook Classic. After hunting and pecking around, I figured out how to get those numbers, because if they match, then the sync was successful. The numbers matched. Good. All the email is synchronized.
Now I have a giant PST of all that Yahoo mail. I do a few tests of connecting/disconnecting it to Outlook Classic to make sure it works. It does. Good.
After that comes documentation time. Documenting what? How to "attach" a PST to Outlook 2019. I screenshot the whole process, screen for screen, with little additional notes and all, and give that to the person the Yahoo account belongs to. I then step them through that whole process to make sure they know how to do it. They do so, make some additional little notes of their own, done. Now they know how to access the backed up email if they ever have to. Good.
After that - because WE'RE STILL NOT DONE YET - copy that entire big honkin' PST file twice. Once to an external drive, once to a USB stick since this person had both. Done. If one PST corrupts/fails/whatever, a backup is ready.
Then FINALLY comes the point where email can be safely deleted out of the Yahoo mail account. I ask the owner of the account if it's okay to only keep email from 2025 and delete everything else. User agrees. I head on in there and mass delete everything older than 2025.
Done yet? Almost. I had to wait for that Yahoo mail to catch up and reindex. It did so a little while later.
DONE. Finally. The Yahoo mail account is safely well within the storage limit and can be used normally once again.
Why does anybody use a Yahoo mail account?
Answer: It's the only email account the user has and it's used to authenticate to everything they have.
At the time I write this, there are Yahoo mail accounts OVER 25 YEARS OLD. Yahoo mail itself is almost 28 years old. Yahoo mail isn't just old enough to drink, but also old enough to rent a car!
I doubt there are many young people signing up for Yahoo mail accounts these days. But as for old accounts, there has to be many millions of them.
Having over 20GB of email sounds insane to most people. But if you were using a free email service that touted 1TB of storage for free, wouldn't you take advantage of that? A bunch of Yahoo mail users did.
Now imagine if all your stuff, that being your banking, social media, forum accounts, EVERYTHING... was all connected to that Yahoo mail account to authenticate with, and oopsie, that 1TB is now 20GB and you need to free up space to fix your busted email account.
When I say busted, I mean truly busted. A Yahoo mail account over the storage limit is effectively locked. You can login to it, but cannot send nor receive any mail AT ALL until storage space within the account is freed back up.
What do you do? Abandoning the email account for another is an option, but for many, that isn't an option at all. That Yahoo mail account has to work because so much stuff is connected to it. Deleting email? Also an option, but for many that's also no-go territory.
If you figured out how to download and back up your Yahoo mail, good for you. Seriously, I mean that.
You might be somebody that uses a Yahoo mail for a lot of stuff, so you figured out how to download/backup your email to keep the account functioning correctly. Very good. Give yourself several pats on the back for that one, because you just saved a bunch of money.
However, I'm sure there will be more than a few Yahoo users who will pay Yahoo to get their 1TB of storage back until they can figure out a way to download/backup everything.
Backing up a Yahoo mail account for free is doable using Outlook Classic 2019, provided you have the space for the backup, and somewhere to put the backup when finished. Easy? Not at all. But doable.
just drive
There's a word that comes to mind when navigation gets so complicated that it becomes ridiculous...
...and that word is convoluted.
Since I'm a navigation nerd, I do sometimes read user reviews of both Garmin navigators like the DriveSmart 66 and popular navigation smartphone apps like Google Maps and Waze. Call it a guilty pleasure, but I do get a laugh reading about the absolutely unreasonable and totally ridiculous feature requests users make.
One of the top complaints has always been routing, which is something that's been going on even before smartphone navigation even existed. Back in the early 2010s when a Garmin nuvi 50LM was what most people used for GPS navigation (or a nuvi 3590 if you were a fancy-pants), oh yeah, people yapped about the routing.
Was the routing bad back then? No. What happened is that if the navigation device didn't calculate a route exactly the way the user wanted, TO THE USER REVIEWS he or she went to give it a 1-star rating.
On the Garmin side of things, there is and has been a way for years to set up routes absolutely exactly the way you want with extremely fine detail, and that's making a route using Garmin BaseCamp software.
You thought you could get ridiculously detailed with routing using Google Maps? You can get even more ridiculous with BaseCamp.
If I wanted to, I could put together a ridiculously long 1,000+ mile route avoiding every tollway, every roundabout, every highway and interstate, every U-turn, use nothing but residential roads, and use no roads exceeding 45mph.
Yeah, I can do that, but won't, because that's convoluted.
Here's an example of something that turned convoluted on me:
There's a specific place I go to once every few months where along the way there's a particularly nasty intersection that always gets jammed up with traffic. Figuring I'd be smart and craft a route around that intersection, I sat down at my computer and created one. Every road seemed to check out, and I was certain the route I made would not only go around that nasty intersection, but also get me to where I wanted to go quicker.
The day comes that I have to drive to that place, I'm ready with my custom route, and off I go. Things are going great, then I get to the part where I go around the intersection, go up a few side roads, and...
...there's an elementary school that I didn't notice when I made my route. And I happened to be going through there exactly at the time school was letting out. Parents in cars everywhere, crossing guards stopping cars, and all the rest of the standard stuff that happens when a school lets out. Traffic is crawling, and there's not a thing I can do except deal with it.
Not only did I not save any time at all, but wasted more time crawling through there at 10 to 15mph along with stops until I finally passed the school. I would have been better off just dealing with that other intersection that gets jacked up with cars.
This isn't to say that creating custom routes is worthless, but it doesn't account for several things, including but not limited to:
- A town deciding to close off Main Street for a parade that you had no idea was going to happen.
- A landscaper's truck blocking an alley that can happen any time during daylight hours.
- A long gravel truck driving exactly where he's not supposed to be and manages to block lanes on both sides of the road where everybody has to wait for 5 to 10 minutes so he can straighten out without hitting a utility pole.
- Road construction that was not reported in advance by anybody and doesn't show up in your navigation system either.
- Random hyper-local weather events like flash flooding, a tree being knocked down, or even something as simple as wind gusts that blow trash/recycle bins directly in the middle of the road.
You get the idea.
How do you accommodate for it all? You don't, because that's impossible. Regardless of how good you are with crafting a custom route, you'll never be able to account for it all.
Intuition is the solution
Custom routes in my experience do not save time because it lacks something. No matter how good technology gets, it doesn't have intuition. Technology thinks rationally, but a lot of human intuition, i.e. a gut feeling, is irrational.
Developing a good intuition requires knowing the map and taking risks.
What kind of risks? I'll give a small example.
There's a town I sometimes drive through where more or less everything there is on Main Street. As such, this street does get clogged up with cars often. And it's one of those towns where it's easy to get in but difficult to get out.
I was in that town to get some stuff done, did so, and when I started to drive out I saw that Main Street was all clogged up as usual. This is when I tapped the Garmin DriveSmart screen to get a 2D map view, like a paper map. I was driving east, and saw a little side street heading south that appeared to connect with a larger boulevard that also headed east. I took it.
Would that side street actually connect to that boulevard or lead me to a dead end? I had no idea, but turned on to it anyway. It was a risk I was willing to take. Fortunately, that street did connect to that boulevard, and I was able to skip all the Main Street traffic entirely.
No navigation system, be it Garmin or phone app, would have tried that. Doing what I did was an irrational go-by-the-gut maneuver that the computer simply will not do.
Sometimes taking risks like that works, sometimes not.
Crafting convoluted custom routes doesn't work to save time, but a good sense of what's around you along with some reasonable risk taking does.
In other words, I just drive and figure things out.
Those seeking a navigation system that always gets routes correct every time is in for some serious disappointment, because that doesn't exist. This was true years ago, it's still true now, and I doubt that will ever change.
the analog watch i almost get along with
As I said just recently, I've tried to get along with an analog watch before but just couldn't. However, this is the one that was so close to agreeing with me, but didn't.
I have the Casio AW80-5BV, which is the only AW80 model that comes on a nylon fabric strap. The other variants either come on steel or resin strap.
Said again, it's not that I can't read an analog dial watch. My brain just doesn't like doing it, so I stick to digital-only.
If my brain could get along with an analog dial, I would wear the AW80-5BV all the time. This is a featherweight watch with 3 alarms, stopwatch, countdown timer, and dual time mode. This is everything anyone needs. AW80 is also one of the easiest watches to show two times at the same time. Local time shown on the analog part and the other shown on the digital panel.
The hands actually have lume on them. It's a near-worthless lume, but there. And it's kind of pointless since the AW80 already has an amber night light.
On the 5BV dial design seen above, it's one of the more thoughtful because you get hour numbers, minute numbers on the outer track and 24-hour numbers on the inner track. If you're the type that likes to read 24-hour time, yeah, this watch has got you covered. You can set the digital to 24-hour and you've still got the 24-hour analog printed on the dial itself in little red numbers.
I don't know any other ana-digi watch that packs so much for both for analog and digital as the AW80 does, which is why I bought it in the first place.
But, unfortunately, my brain just doesn't agree with analog time reading no matter what.
This honestly makes me wonder if I'd be better off with a Movado super-sterile style dial to get an analog watch my brain can agree with.
Yeah, I know Movado is a fashion watch brand. However, many of their models are the ultimate for a dial that takes minimalism to its extreme. I'm talking about the models with just two hands (no seconds hand), one marker for noon at top and absolutely nothing else.
It could be the reason my brain doesn't get along with an analog dial is due to distraction. A Movado super-sterile dial is almost as distraction-free as it gets.
What could possibly be more distraction-free than that? A one-hand watch. All you get is an hour hand. Some of the one-handers are 12-hour dials and the other 24-hour dials. And I have to admit, the idea of a one-hand 24-hour dial is kinda neat. However, I would only take a one-hand 24-hour dial with hour markers because they would be necessary. For a 12-hour however, the dial could be completely blank and that would still work for me.
I may look into getting an analog watch with minimalist sterile dial just to see if my brain agrees with it.
i will never get along with analog watches
I've tried to get along with an analog watch, and it's just not happening.
My daily wearer is still the Casio W735H. Mine has wear on it now because I've worn it so much. This watch agrees with my skinny wrist. By the numbers of 51.4mm lug-to-lug, 47.1mm diameter case, and 16.1mm thick, this watch should not fit my wrist, yet it does. The W735H has "wings" after the case that drop off like a cliff with a very sharp downturn. And because of the hybrid resin/nylon fabric strap on the particular model I have (one side nylon, other side resin with a loop for the fabric part), the watch magically fits me even with the overhang at the bottom. I say magically because I can't even explain why it fits me, because again, it absolutely shouldn't.
This is not about fitment, but rather the conclusion I've begrudgingly come to that I will never get along with analog dial watches no matter what.
Two examples of analog watches I own:
The Casio MTP4500D, which does fit my wrist very well with its 48mm lug-to-lug, 42mm diameter case and 11.3mm thickness, looks absolutely amazing. It really does. Small seconds subdial, chronograph, screw-back case for easy battery changes, black dial with neat looking orange hands... the watch just looks good.
Another is the "Cartier Tank" of Casio watches, the AQ230. I own two of these. A silver case with stick hour markers on a black dial and a gold with stick markers on a gold/linen dial. The AQ230 is featherlight at just 47g.
With the MTP4500D, I love the fact it's time-only. Set it, put on the wrist and go. Easy. The problem is that depending on what time of the day it is, I may get confused as to what time it actually is. If it's 6:40pm, I may confuse that as 7:40pm. I don't know why my brain thinks that way when looking at an analog clock at certain times of the day, but it does.
With the AQ230, I can set the little digital part to display digital time instead of the date. That's ridiculous, because it defeats the whole point of wearing an analog timepiece in the first place. The watch has a small-square-luxury appearance going on and looks fantastic, but my brain still periodically gets that same time confusion like with the MTP4500D.
Is there a solution to that confusion on my part while staying analog? Yes, and it's called a jump hour watch. This is technically digital even though no LCD panel is present. Jump hour watches have two little panels. One for hour, and the other for minute. Some include a seconds dial and/or a date complication while others do not.
I have two problems with jump hour watches. The first is that they look a little weird. The second is that I am absolutely and totally used to seeing time + weekday + month + date all on one screen of a Casio digital, which you can't get on most analog watches.
For analog, the most convenient is the Seiko 5 because all of them have a day-date complication. And if it's a diver, you get the dive timer too (I don't dive, but absolutely would use that timer for other things). I mean, sure, you could go with a Rolex Day-Date to be fancy, but a Seiko 5 suits better as a daily wearer. For something more highfalutin as an extremely good daily wearer, several Seiko Prospex models have the day-date on it with the dive timer also.
On those watches, you get time, date, weekday, timer (on most), and that's it. No month. But like I said, I am absolutely and totally used to seeing time + weekday + month + date, having the timer on a separate screen, and also having an alarm and stopwatch...
...and wow, is that difficult to give up. I just don't want to do it.
Now if I wanted to go flat out luxury digital to keep all the features I like with full steel, Casio has that with the G-SHOCK GMWB5000D. That is one of the "full metal" digital G-SHOCKs. There is also the super-highfalutin break-the-bank made in Japan MRGB5000D. And when I say break-the-bank, no, it's not at the cost of upper tier Grand Seiko watches, but it is up there in the G-SHOCK world.
Both of those watches are obviously nice, but total overkill for me because I get all the stuff I want out of my W735H.
Is the W735H I wear an ugly watch? Basically, yes. It will never win any beauty awards. But again, it's got all the features I really like.
What I am hoping to someday find is a luxury or at least a luxury-looking digital watch where I don't lose any features, and is one that fits my skinny wrist. Yeah, that is a bit of a tall order. (And no, the answer is not a smartwatch. I can't stand those things.)
The closest thing to that right now other than the G-SHOCKs I mentioned is the Casio WV58DA. I already have the resin strap version of that, and the dial design on that one is... okay. Not as good as the W735H. Certainly not as good as the G-SHOCKs.
My search continues. Until then, I'll keep wearing my ugly W735H.
Garmin DriveSmart 66 finally gets a lock screen
This was a long time coming, but better late than never.
It's kind of funny, because Garmin was in fact ahead of its time and then grossly behind the time at the same time.
I'll explain.
In early-early nuvi models like the nuvi 250W from the late 2000s, there was in fact a section called Garmin Lock. And then Garmin took out that feature in later models after that. No more Garmin Lock. This is the way things stayed for well over a decade. And oh yes, people were really upset about it. They complained. Loudly. Garmin didn't put it back.
At long last, Garmin finally brought back the lock screen.
In one of the more recent system software updates, the DriveSmart 66, DriveSmart 76 and DriveSmart 86 now has the lock screen that was taken away over a decade ago.
From Settings > Device, there is now the option for Screen Lock, where you can set a PIN for every power-on, using a 4 to 16 digit PIN of your choosing.
For those early-early models, the maximum PIN length was 4 digits, meaning a number between 0000 and 9999. Now the PIN can be a number between 0000000000000000 and 9999999999999999.
The nice part here is the PIN doesn't have to be 16 digits long. It can be 4 digits, 5, 8, 10, whatever. Anything from 4 to 16 digits in length can be used.
Garmin was really late to the party putting a lock screen back into their navigators, but it's there now, and that's good.