The last time you saw a free email client from Microsoft was Outlook Express 6, released with Windows XP. That was in October of 2001 and I was still in college. I used email to contact my professors, browsed the campus newsgroups for event updates, and even received a few spam messages here and there. For my needs nothing fit better than OE6 and I was happy. That was almost 5 years ago. The troubles of yesteryear are now distant memories. As I’ve moved forward so have the technologies around us. Words like Blogging and phishing were only uttered in small circles back then and TLA (three-letter acronyms) like RSS were in their infancy. Not anymore. Blogging and RSS looks like they’re here to stay and phishing is more dangerous than ever. Now is the time to add life back into my favorite free email client and we’re injecting a large dose of adrenaline to kick things back up.

There’s a ton of new features, a new face, and a fresh new start for our newly dubbed Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta (WLMDB). Those of us on the team have been working heads down on this for a long while now and you can’t imagine how eager we are to finally talk directly to you about it. Let’s start off with a small list of our features:

• Integration with Windows Live Mail and Messenger – Get direct access to your Windows Live Mail e-mails without having to configure any server settings. Plus integrated Messenger contacts directly in the email client. (In case you’re confused by our new name just think Hotmail when you read Windows Live Mail and think of us when you read Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta. The Desktop part makes us special. )
  
  
• Photo Mail – Photo Mail will let you send your favorite vacation pictures as thumbnails to all of your friends and family then automatically upload a larger version to MSN. Each thumbnail received will have a link to a much higher quality large image. This is a great feature that is only found in the MSN Premium e-mail client for paying MSN members. We’ve now taken this component and integrated it into WLMDB.
  
  
• RSS Feeds – Our program managers, developers, and tester have worked hard with the IE7 team to integrate RSS feeds directly into Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta. You can now view and forward them as if they were regular emails. We will explore this feature more in upcoming blogs.
  
  
• Anti-Phishing –WLMDB will warn you of malicious emails that try to steal your identity. We understand the threats lurking out there and we’re going to do out best to protect you.
  
  
• Word Wheel – The feature with the weird name you won’t be able to live without. Search all of your emails in split-second times from any folder. I started using it a few months ago and now I can’t believe how I was able to search through thousands of emails without it.
  
  
• Multiple accounts - We designed this to work with Windows Live Mail, but you can download any POP or IMAP e-mails into WLMDB. This way you can see all your accounts and e-mails from one organized place.
  
  
• And there’s more! – This is just a short random list of some of our new features and no where close to covering all of the new stuff.
  

We're going to go into a small, managed beta with WLMDB in the coming weeks and when we're ready for more people to play with it we'll put up info on ideas.live.com so you can sign up for the beta.

Stay tuned in the next few days and weeks as different members of the WLMDB team take turns unveiling the features they’ve been working on for the past year. We’ve waited a long time to talk about this so you’ll have to excuse us if we seem overly excited.