the company i work for has 6 pc's. they are all running windows 10 and have ms office 2013 installed. 4 are using outlook and 2 are using windows live mail (don't ask).

late last thursday afternoon, one by one, the email systems on all machines began to get send/receive errors. i figured it was an isp problem. i didn't bother calling them since it was end of day and i figured it'd be back to normal overnight.

i was wrong. no change on friday morning.

i called to see if they were having issues or if it was just us. just us.

i spent an hour friday morning and a few in the afternoon trying to hunt down the problem with tech support. nothing had been changed on our end. we changed ports. checked authentication settings. and more. i was able to use their on-line mail system with no problem. i even installed and setup thunderbird and it worked fine. both of us were stumped especially because it was outlook AND windows live mail that were affected.

they finally gave up. now i'm left with the problem.

1) as a quick fix, i can switch all the machines to use their on-line system. the only problem i see there immediately is a limitation on the size of their contact "file". there may be others.

2) i thought about uninstalling and re-installing outlook 2013. from what i can see, it seems to be tied into the whole office 2013 business. am i missing a way to uninstall/reinstall it?

3) since i know thunderbird works, i can try that. however:

3a) one of the pc's is used by 3 people. it's using windows live mail and has multiple email accounts set up in it. can you do this in thunderbird?
3b) i myself use outlook to mass mail messages to clients twice per week. anywhere from 2 to 30 clients. word has the ability to feed mail merged documents to outlook to send out. can you do this in thunderbird?

any suggestions on the above or on another solution?

thanks in advance,

terry