>I wonder if this technique stil works for Window 7 since Outlook Express is no longer available.

It was flaky to begin with, because it would, behind the scenes, take the identity from whichever Outlook was installed on the development machine and set with a set of parameters for SMTP. Then on a target machine, where it may run under who knows which account, it would fail because there was no identity set in any Outlook there.

And then there's the business of getting those parameters from the customer, permissions on their SMTP server (even that can be a problem), etc etc. Should have been simple, but often gets complicated.