I recently watched a video on an AIM revival project, and while the subject matter itself wasn’t directly relevant to me—I don’t really have nostalgia for AIM specifically because it wasn’t really popular where I grew up—something in the video did catch my eye: the short sample of writing an email with Outlook Express.
Now this is bound to feel a bit strange to many a person, partially because email is still a thing that exists and seems quite disliked by a lot of people, partially because I don’t know if many people have fond memories of OE specifically, but it triggered a memory in me. So there I am, a kid using Windows XP, and like a tech-interested child I poke around with the available software out of curiosity and stumble upon OE. Now, at this point I’m fairly certain that we had already gotten our student emails at schools, but those were using some sort of webmail interface (thinking back, it was probably Horde), and I probably had a personal email account from somewhere like Luukku, but I tend to like “real” software over webapps because it just feels so much more serious—and importantly at the time, more adult.
So there I am, trying to figure out the terms the software is throwing at me with a much less informative internet than we have today: what’s a POP3? How do I configure a SMTP? Where do I find these settings for my email provider (spoiler: webmail was the only option)? Now I did spend a decent amount of time poking around, trying to get things working, but never really did. Later on, I kind of ended up “skipping” OE and went straight to a more featured email client in Thunderbird, so it ended up remaining something of the “one that got away” for me because I never really had reason to use it. Later on when I remembered it again, I had progressed past using Windows XP and I don’t think it was available for Windows 7; instead we got Windows Live Mail which just felt like a toy to me so I never really had reason to try it.
It feels a bit strange to look so fondly back on software I never really used from a company I rather dislike, but it just seems to fit perfectly into the time when I was a child looking forward to growing up and the future, and in general as was the theme of the video, when technology just felt more fun. While it is certainly still possible to have fun with technology—and I frequently do—I’m just also much more aware of the bad things going on in this sphere and the negative pressures that are actively making software worse today; it just felt like a hopeful reminder of what technology can be to me and what it can enable.