I forgot to add that I was using Firefox. I just checked it again There are now 5 characters in the 'from' field. I just went and tried it via IE. All seems to be fine from there. I'm presently running House Call to see if I might have any nasties that AVG didn't get. Sue

Hi, DA I'm not hiding state secrets either ! :-D But as the help forums at Gmail and Hotmail show, many people are hacked daily. (Not surprising, I suppose. Just do a search at YouTube for "Hotmail" or "Gmail" and see how many of the search results are how-to videos for hacking the accounts ! Just how many people out there are amateur hackers trying all these tricks to gain entry to someone's account ?!) Anyway, from reading the various threads, trying to get control back for an account to which one no longer has access -- esp. with a free email service ! -- can be a veritable nightmare, to put it mildly. Locked out, recovery options not working, etc. And the users are often limited to help via forums, often getting canned responses of "it's basically your own fault" even if it wasn't. Hopefully, people can convince tech support that they are, in fact, the legitimate 'owners' of the email account in question and can get it back without much trouble. But will all their email be there when they regain access ?? For others it's enough of a hassle to make them want to change providers, and even pay for better support in case it happens again. To avoid these frustrations the general advice from the 'experts' usually boils down to two items: better security upfront (strong password, difficult security question, etc.) and back ups (auto-forwarding to another account at another provider, downloading to one's email client, etc.). Like you, DA, most of my own online 'accounts' (message boards, twitter, or whatever) use a 6-8 character password that's not really all that difficult. But for my (two) email accounts I use the "nuclear launch code" method (LOL) just because I don't want to end up as so many others have, with loss of account and/or loss of all one's saved email information (messages, family photos, receipts, etc.). Fortunately, ilovedobies is at least still allowed access to the Hotmail account in question and apparently still has all saved emails, photos, etc. As you know, not all hackers (if that's the correct explanation here) are so 'kind.'

Hotmail/Live/Outlook.com (all the same!) goes down. A lot. It has nothing to do with your end's equipment. If one of their servers goes south, it drags. It shows up badly because it keeps EVERYTHING except your message headers and preferences on its servers. That includes your attachments, mail, mail aliases, and address book. You rely on their servers to be hot and spicy, and they ain't always so. If you complain (I have) they'll get back to you after things are fixed and report no problem found.

Also, their formatting is having the opposite effect as well ... pictures that were formatted as smaller by using height= and width= are now showing up in their huge original size. For example, let's say I have posted 3 pictures side by side. The original size for the first one in pixels is 200x200, the second is 300x300, and the third is 800x800. Using formatting, I could have all 3 pictures show up as 200x200. Their new formatting is overriding the pictures and reverting them to their original sizes, so the 3rd picture is showing up as huge in comparison. Now, let's assume that 800x800 is the largest picture they will allow. If someone posts a picture that is larger than that, then it is automatically being resized down to their max of 800x800. As writersblock pointed out, that is making some of the pics too small to be legible. And they still have not fixed the font style. They still have it in this hard to read font. Can we please revert back to "do no harm" ? Tamara, where are you ?!?!?!?!