Change the color if you want to feel a different experience:

This work brings us closer to the design of Messenger and just makes the entire experience that much nicer. What do you think?

We've also taken feedback from a lot of our first wave of beta testers and addressed some of the concerns. We've fixed hundreds of bugs since our last release and tried to improve on areas that have come up short in the past.

In other news, Vlada, your faithful Q&A guru and Program Manager has just departed the team for a 4 month trip around Europe. The team gave her a proper send off over lunch last week and then again later that night in Seattle. We'll miss you Vlada... and send us some Photo Emails!

Your diligent worker bee,

Feedback to comments:
Everyone: How can I get an invite?
I've got your emails all in a list, no worries. I'll talk to our PM about the options we have for adding you all to the beta. But as of now, the list is already set and picked from current Messenger beta testers. Please stop posting your e-mail addresses in the comments section. Once we have offical steps in place, you'll be the first to know.

pcbob_2706: when is the software going to  be released???????????
Right now we're in a closed beta period and it will be released to the public once we feel it gives the experience we're looking for. However, the beta will be expanding to include more people so once the details are details are available, you'll find them here.

Paulo: Hello Lei, a simple question, WLMD have support for Newsgroups? . Thanks
Yup, full newsgroup support with additional Communities support. We'll try to blog about that feature soon. :)

Richie: I'd like to know if a newer version fixes the issues I have raised.
We're on build 7xx now for the next beta release coming up soon, so I would imagine a lot of bugs have been fixed.

JackDMF: Do I have to use my Msn-Account with live mail desktop?
Nope, any Hotmail, Live, or MSN account will work.

T-Ony: ...A few graphic glitches also...
We're tracking a lot of these bugs but if you want to point them out specifically, I'll be sure to log them if they're not already in the system. I understand the ads are annoying and we're working on improving that experience for premium users.

paulo: the Ads are only for no Premiun users, or are for all ?
Currently, ads are for everyone but we're looking at other options once the beta period is over.

Is there a calendar use set up to access your hotmail/live calendar?
No, there is no calendar support at the moment built into Mail Desktop Beta.

Beck: Not sure I like the colours.
I feel ya. That's why we give you the option to change the colors to more than just the 2 I gave the screen shots to. Red, orange, pink, green, brown... they're all there. I got mine set to a dark navy blue.

Baltazar: Where is a better contacts handling? And Live Calendar?
Great feedback. We're definitely investigating these as future features but we can't do everything at once. The features we're delivering for this beta are what we consider essential to the Mail Desktop Beta user experience. From there, we already have a list of feature we definitely want to add and we will add them in due time. Can you also clarify what type of contacts handling you're looking for in the client? This will help us identify what our users are looking for.

Bleak Morn: What sort of S/MIME functionality is in this product?
Can you be more specific? I'd love to answer this question.

Moe: Why do I still have to pay for MSN Premium now that all the features are offered for free on Windows Live Services?
MDB does not include all of the features of MSN Premium, such as parental control. So if you're a fan of features like that, you may want to keep your MSN Premium account around.

Baltazar: [Integrated contacts] should be a must on Mail Desktop.
Our contacts manager is being shared with Messenger and offers a very integrated experience.

Dave: Do you know what are the plans for microsoft live calendar, and when can we get a look ?
We are looking at a Calendar feature and I would personally love to see it. But as of now, we just don't have the time or resources do to it.  We will address this concern in a future release.

Windows Live Mail questions and complaints
Any issues or concerns about Windows Live Mail (formerly Hotmail) should be taken to the Windows Live Mail blog. 

 

Hey there, my name is Aaron; I’m a Software Design Engineer in Test here on the Mail Team. I work on the Contacts feature as well as reliability testing.

Here on the Mail Team, we’ve been working hard to create a super cool Contacts experience throughout your mail product! The Contacts feature within Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta (MDB) places you and the people you care about at the center of the experience through mail composition, message viewing, as well as a fun, seamless integration with Windows Live Messenger.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at some of the new Contacts coolness!

First, we’ll be looking at our Contacts experience in the message preview pane.

Contacts in the Message Preview Pane

Next, let’s take a look at the Contacts personal status area within the main MDB window.

Contacts Personal Status Area

Well, that’s all on Contacts context for now. We are super excited for you to get your hands on MDB to spread the love to your contacts!

-Aaron

The common situation now? (at least for me )

• First I have to decide how many pictures I *can* send (note: not should but can send—2 very different things) because some mail applications have a low, low, low limit on attachments (seriously? Do I really have to choose between my 10 pictures of the most beautiful sunset ever?...right now YES)
  
  
• Second, I feel bad for my friends and family who’ll receive the pictures. How much fun is it to go through each one, double-click to view, close, repeat.
  
  
• There is no way for me to add any funny captions—how am I expected to explain why I have a sleeping mask on my mouth?
  
  
  
• If I don’t go with the attachment option, then I do snapfish or ofoto or another online service—also a big pain for those who aren’t members of snapfish. After all, why should my friends become members of *my* club just to look at some pictures?
  

How are we going to make it better?

We are (re)introducing Photo E-mail—a super duper easy way to share photos (for those of you who use MSN Premium client this will be very familiar).

As soon as you insert a few pictures they show up in the message with an easy way to add some (funny) captions. We’ve also decided to give you a few fun and productive tools to make your pictures truly yours:

• you’ll be able to add some borders
  
  
  
• change pictures to black and white
  
  
  
• change background color
  
  
  
• and even auto-correct.

When designing this we debated a lot of what we should offer and decided to start with these tools until we hear more user feedback. We don’t ever want to be a full photo editing tool, but we do want to make things easier for our customers (Thank you Heather for making the tough calls; Heather was the original PM on the feature). So let us know what you think!

On sending these pictures, the photos will be uploaded to our servers and smaller versions will be placed inside the message (Thank you Dare, Richard, and Jura from the storage team on making this happen!). This will make sure that your friends and family don’t get huge messages that fill out their inboxes. In fact, this is what they’ll see:

If your friends want to view bigger versions of the photos, all they have to do is hit “Play slideshow”. This is where are our friends from the Spaces team come in. They’ve created an awesome viewer for your friends and family to enjoy your pictures (Thank you DeEtte, Greg, and James).

Phew…that’s about it. The last thing to say is that we want to hear from you. What else do you do with photos? How do you share them now? What can we do to make it easier and more fun for you to share photos?

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Vlada/Heather (“PM”), Azmy/Mark (“Dev”), Lei (“Test”), Jill/Mike (“Usability”), Eddie/Gannon (“Design”), James/Paul/Antonia (“User Assistance”), and Liying/Laurence (“Intl”)

-Vlada Breiburg