On Oct 28, 2005, at 6:09 AM, Richard ramsowr wrote: > sorry, I wasn't clearer on the subject - anyway my > DSL provider is SBC and I find myself using their mail > program which they call "SBC Yahoo Mail"- one of those > thing where - when you sign up for their DSL service - > one just kind of fall in to it. > > anyway wanted to tranfer (move) off of sbc and onto > one of Apple's offerings I currently have both > Apple's .Mac and of course OS X's Mail - not even sure > what the differents is between the two. > > I guess I just tired of have some large corporation > cramming somthing up my you know what. Maybe I'm nuts > but I have always used an apple albeit some what new > to OS X and I'm just tired of not having the full > experence. Hell if I could find a way to do way with > the sbc thing completely I would but sbc is sbc and I'm > down here in Houston and not back in San Francisco > anymore - what can I say It appears that part of your issue is that you don't understand the difference between a mail server or service such as Apple's .Mac or SBC/Yahoo and a mail client such as Apple's "Mail" application. So let's see if we can clear that up. Mail being sent to you ends up at a mail server such as Apple's .Mac or your ISP's - SBC/Yahoo in your case. To read your mail you start a client, an application local to your computer such as Apple's "Mail" or Eudora, it connects to the servers you've told it about, and your mail is downloaded to your machine and may or may not be left on the server - depending on the features of the server and your client's settings. Sending mail works in the opposite direction. You compose the message in your client, which then connects to your service provider's server, and that server then sends your message to the appropriate place. SBC/Yahoo doesn't have a mail "program" that I know of. They provide a mail service/server that you can access either via a web page or the email client of your choice. Are you currently accessing your SBC email via a web page and not aware that you can get to it from whatever client you might want to use? For me or Charles or someone else to help you we need to know how you're currently accessing your SBC email. Once we know that we can advise you as to the pros/cons of storing mail in your local client or a server, how to move mail from one server to another (which may or may not be easy depending on the destination), and how to have new mail coming into one server be automatically forwarded to another either directly by the receiving server or possibly by your mail client. As I asked above, I suspect that you're currently accessing your SBC mail via their web page and that if you switch to using a mail client, such as Apple's "Mail", your complaints about "not having the full experience" will go away since their mail service is basically like any other mail service. If none of this is making any sense feel free to contact me directly and we can arrange to talk via telephone or something like Skype or iChat. Phil