I personally run my scans when I am not using the pc, I am up pretty late and never turn off my machines, I turn on a scan before I go to bed and let it run, I run them on different nights not all the same night, I usually do mine on the weekends, just makes it easy for me to remember to do it. I do weekly scans. I use AVAST for AV and have it set up to do the screensaver scan so anytime my pc is idle long enough for the screensaver to come on it starts doing an AV scan while the screen saver is going if I come back it stops, then at the next idle time it begins again from where it left off. I don't have to schedule scans. Now with spywareblaster there is no scan all you have to do there is hit the update button allow it to get the updates and then hit the enable all protection button and it is done just sits there in the back ground doing its wonderful job, I do that about once a week, I also am often on many of the support forums which have sections on them that daily give the lists of everything that has an update each day, if you would like to be able to check a very good one is the Calendar of updates Calendar of Updates Just put a link to it on your bookmarks bar and hit it daily to see what has updates. Excellent forums there also. but to answer one of your questions you can run them while using the pc but it will usually take longer, that is why usually it is suggested to run the scans alone.

rather than deleting one when it is like that instead use that email address when signing up for things online or when ordering stuff that way if it gets on some spam list no harm it is already a spammed addy. Most people do just that then always have one address that is solely used for that type of action and never use their good main email addy for anything other than actual email with family and friends. however the way they turn into spammed addys is when you have people that forward email to you with exposed addys in the To field, the spammers start those just to have them spread like a fire and then they rake in all those email addys. Which is why everyone should use the BCC feature when emailing. I have many email addresses, one is yahoo which I rarely use but in all the years I have had it I have had maybe 4 spam. My hotmail which I use daily I get maybe 4-5 a week. Using the provided spam filters also helps and anytime you get a spam mail make sure to send it to the spam or junk folder rather than delete it so that the program can learn what is junk.

The answer to my second question is this... Earthlink has been trying to phase out a particular server for years now. You need to access your server settings via account settings and change the server and port assignments. Problem laid to rest... ver 2.0 installed

Always nice to have conversation! I'd like to change one comment I made. I suspect smartphone email use is very high. How high, I don't know, but almost every public and private system of any size accommodates their use with special access and apps. Google's Mail Fetcher will combine up to 5 different email accounts into one, so that you can access them all in one place. When you do "reply", you can change the return address so it looks to have come from the other "remote" account. I suspect you could do more than 5 by cascading the accounts, but no one should need more than a few email accounts. If that's wrong, let me know! grandms, my comments had nothing to do with work vs private use. Awkward is awkward, easy is easy. Make yourself happy with however you want to go about your mail tasks. I was just trying to offer a suggestion to people having questions or trouble trying to do something that they may not have known was unnecessary DA, if your governmental agency didn't want web access used, they could turn it off. I suspect the reason is an attempt to decrease the load on their system by offloading some of the work to the client software. Mudlady, keep up the good attitude. Be open to new ways, that's what technological advances are all about. Without those advances, you'd still be struggling away with that Zenith and getting by without all the great functionality today's online world offers. Those changes seem to have been ok with you, you may be more open to change than you think.