An elderly friend of mine who is not tech savvy at all needs help with email.
He is not local to me, so I would be doing all of the setup over the Internet on his windows computer.
The thing is, he gets confused with two factor and email codes and cell phone texts and all that sort of thing. So we need a dead simple email provider that doesn’t require any of that stuff. He is willing to pay a small bit for the service, and I would probably just handle the payment and charge him so that he doesn’t get confused with any fake bills or anything.
What is the email provider that you all would recommend for a situation like this? I was thinking maybe Fastmail, but this is not the sort of scenario that I normally shop for.
The last company I worked for was founded by a man who was “retired”, but still actively involved. I didn’t know it at the time but I was also tech support for his friends, family, and others that he met in his travels.
One was a man in his 80’s located more than a thousand miles away. I was given his name and phone number and told to set him up with an email account in the founder’s private domain.
This was my experience. As I recall, once I got him set up, he only called me once or twice. A few years later his son, who was in his 60s, called once for some minor problem with the account.
I would search for information about seniors and technology, not for a simple email provider. Here’s an example that I just found. Good luck.
I use Fastmail’s “app” (which is essentially a wrapper around their web interface) and can’t recall needing to use 2FA again after logging in for the first time.
PS: Fastmail also supports passkeys. Depending on the platform that this person is using that might be an option instead of TOTP? (On Mac it’s essentially just Touch ID, which the person might already be using for other stuff)
Windows PC. I wouldn’t want to set up passkeys in any instance, as this seems to be the sort of person that would possibly have a hard time with a texted confirmation code.
I figure if I can configure a vanilla mail client with an email provider, I probably won’t have to touch things until he switches computers at some point in the future. And at that point I’ll have the email username/password to set it up again.
I have seen recent articles indicating that Touch ID is unreliable for older people. That mirrors my experience with Touch ID on a Mac keyboard, so I stopped using it in favor of an Apple Watch that has been much more reliable.
Given enough time and luck, we will all become elderly and tech will become inescrutable. It’s important to lead a life that takes us to keep friends like @webwalrus
Once Fastmail is setup on Thunderbird, it doesn’t require an 2FA. It uses OAuth2 to log in, which will ask for the 2FA code once and then shouldn’t again - they have a guide here for setting up Fastmail with Thunderbird.
