Hi to all.

On July 3, I switched over from my MSN phone account with Qwest to the Cox Cable high-speed Internet service.  My mother and I were told prior to the switch that the technician would switch the E-mail accounts for us and to have a contacts list printed out.  When the technician arrived, he indicated that we were supposed to be setting up the E-mail ourselves.

So today, I contacted Cox myself and got the account set up.  Now comes the tricky part where I am having problems.  I asked the phone support tech person if he knew anything about forwarding my E-mails (including the E-mails I have saved in various folders) to my new account and changing the contacts list from the old to the new account.  His answer was no; that Cox didn't assist people with these matters.  He did ask what kind of service I had been using, and I answered that it was essentially a hot-mail account but with msn.com instead of hotmail.com.  I indicated that I was using webmail only (I have Outlook with Microsoft Office 2000, but I never used it and have never set it up).  He suggested that I contact the service I had been using.

Before I did that, however, I decided to see how far I could get on my own.  Setting up the forwarding of future E-mails was easy--my note here should be showing up on the Cox webmail account.  However, I have reached a brick wall when attempting to export the contacts list from the MSN account to the Cox account.  To export the information, I have to either "run" or "save" the file as a .csv file to be opened by either Excel or Internet Explorer.  However, to import the list to the Cox account, while the file has to be a csv one, my choices are Outlook, Outlook Express (which I don't have), Firefox, Netscape, Webedge 2 or Webedge 3--again none of which I have.  My questions on the E-mail files, then, are:

1) Step by step, how do I transfer my contacts list from my MSN webmail account to my Cox webmail account; and

2)  Short of sending each message individually, how do I send all of the E-mails I've saved from the MSN account to the Cox account.  Any assistance with this matter would be appreciated as there is a $20 charge per month if I keep the MSN account.

Now, as you'll note from the subject line, I have a virus-program question.  Up until today, I was using AVG 7.5 which was fairly easy to use as an anti-virus program.  However, AVG7.5 is going away at the end of the year, AVG8.0 is not as accessible, and Cox has its own deal with another company for a security suite that includes firewall, pop-up blocker, and anti-spy programs as well as the antivirus program.  The service Cox is using is Macafee, which, I have been told (and which I have learned after downloading it) is not very accessible--most of the buttons are not well-marked, and I am finding that where I can make changes outside of the program through the computer system itself (such as task-scheduling), I am better off doing it that way.

I have three questions with respect to the Macafee:  (1) Are there any programs out there that make it easier for a totally blind person like myself to read it; (2) The program requested I change my IE 7 security settings from Medium-high to Medium before I downloaded it.  Can I safely return the IE settings to Medium-high or will that affect the program's updating process; and (3) During the middle of the download, I got one of those Internet Explorer error messages to which I sent an error report.  The program continued to download, but I wonder if I should worry about the possibility of something not loading that should be loading.

I await all responses.

Ted Chittenden


    VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
Archived on the World Wide Web at
    http://listserv.icors.org/archives/vicug-l.html
    Signoff: [log in to unmask]
    Subscribe: [log in to unmask]