Like many of you, my windows 7 machine can no longer send/receive emails through Windows Live Mail without either (a) upgrading to Windows 10 (which I have tested on my machine and it nullifies about $20K worth of software I use for audio/video production and cannot afford to just simply upgrade...unless MS wants to send me the funds to do so)...or (b) purchasing a new account with Outlook 365 (which sorta defeats the purpose of free email)...or (c) access my email through the MS web portal (meaning if I receive an email and do not have internet access, then I won't know about it).

Based on wording of the emails I received I assumed that I could go and set everything up in Thunderbird so I could just send/receive emails through my Hotmail account (yeah...almost 19 years). After importing all of my .eml folders to corresponding folders in Thunderbird, I attempted to send/receive emails for the first time with Thunderbird but received the Error Message stating that:

"Sending of password for user *** Email address is removed for privacy *** did not succeed. Mail server pop-mail.outlook.com responded: This account has POP disabled. Go to the Outlook.com options page to enable POP."

I am unable to do this now since the Outlook site does not entail this feature anymore.

So I guess my question is, do I now have to go to all of my contacts and all of my banking and credit card and merchant accounts to update my email settings to a new and different (and non-Microsoft-related) email account?

If this is the case, then, just for the record, I would like to say thank you to the kind folks at Microsoft for losing a long-standing account holder. I was already anti-Windows 10, but that is rapidly changing to anti-Microsoft in general.

If anyone has suggestions or can help me figure out how to avoid the hassle-ridden circumstances Microsoft has put me in, please feel free to do so...and thank you in advance for any assistance.