Hey all!

Last week we released a new update on our servers and fixed bugs on the following issues:

Syncing Calendar:

No more super-high CPU usage!  You will no longer see errors resulting from a high CPU usage for the couple of minutes after the calendar sync.  Also, you'll also see fewer error messages in general - we fixed some issues with checking for new calendar updates and meeting requests.

Shared Calendars:

We’ve fixed some of the rules for settings – so now, when you change the calendar settings for a shared calendar, it is updated for all of the other participants.

Thanks for all of your feedback (and keep it coming!)  We hope you enjoy using Calendar both on the web and in Windows Live Mail!

-Janani

I don’t know about you, but I like to spice up my surroundings with a little color.  A white wall in a room or a white dinner plate on a table is really just the perfect canvas for something colorful – some stripes of paint or a great tomato sauce (you choose which goes on the wall and which on the plate J).

I like to have the same experience on my computer – let’s be honest, I spend far more hours staring at the screen than I do that wall or that plate – and it’s been both fun and useful for me to personalize the colors in Windows Live Mail.  In the latest build of Mail, there are three areas you can play with and customize colors for:

1. The frame

2. Each email account header & the email titles

3. Each calendar & the events associated with it

Here’s an example of how my email account list looks:

I’ve made the frame green (using this button on the toolbar:  ) and then colorized each account differently.  Oooh, pretty. 

I find the colors both fun & useful – having the accounts be different colors helps reinforce for me which account I’m looking at, plus the email subject line matches the account color, so even when I’m reading mail I know which account I’m looking at.  Notice how the purple subject line here matches the purple of my Live account that this mail was sent to.  Super handy.

The new calendar also supports fun & useful colorization.  By giving each calendar its own color, it’s simple for me to look at my upcoming day, week, or month and know what events are associated with which part of my family (me or my daughters, for example) and what other critical stuff is coming up (don’t forget to send the Christmas cards!).

Here’s what my calendar looks like:

Enjoy making Windows Live Mail match your color personality.

Tanja, Windows Live Mail PM

The Windows Live Calendar team is about to release more cool features to our web calendar service.  In preparation for this upgrade, we expect 4-5 hours of downtime starting on Tuesday, January 13, at 11am Pacific time.  This downtime will also affect your calendar in Windows Live Mail.  We apologize for any inconvenience.  You should see your calendar back up and running with the new functionality by Thursday, January 15.

Microsoft has put a lot of emphasis in recent years on usability studies – throughout the development process for our products, we make sure to bring customers in to see how well they’re able to accomplish various tasks. We give them a computer and a list of common activities users need to do every day with Windows Live Mail – setup a new email account, read email, search for old emails, etc… We then see if the user can successfully accomplish the tasks without help and use that information to help point out ways to improve our product. Usability studies are just part of how we ensure that we’re building software that’s usable by both advanced and beginner users – we try and think about how to make products that are easy to use from the initial conception all the way to release.  A good example of how this can change a product is email account setup.

Back when we were first creating Windows Live Mail, it became obvious to our team that setting up email accounts can be a difficult task for people. In order to set up an email account you need to know a couple pieces of information that consumers normally don’t need to think about and that are hard to remember – to use a classic example, my mom doesn’t know what a POP or IMAP server is, nor should she have to. In usability studies where users have to set up new email accounts and they need to do detailed setup involving detailed server settings like this, many, many people failed to successfully set up the account without detailed and exact instructions of what to do. So, our team added a feature that we call Autodiscovery.

What is Autodiscovery?

Autodiscovery is a part of the email account setup process – when you start to add a new email account, we ask you only for your email address and password, and from that, we can often automatically setup your new email account without entering any more information. This is great, because everyone knows their email address and password (hopefully – if you’ve forgotten your password you have bigger problems :), so setting up an email account is simple – no changing your IMAP port or figuring out whether you need to enable SSL.  If the user’s server isn’t in our list of known servers, we just let them go through the normal setup process they would have gone through before. It’s a real win for users because email account setup is easy and accomplished quickly.

So how does this work?

The Windows Live Mail team has compiled a list of commonly used email servers from ISPs around the world and the email settings to make them work. When you enter your email address, we compare the domain name in that address to the domain names in our list. If we find a match, we then use those server settings.  From time to time, we update this list of email servers by looking at the major ISPs in countries around the world.

Stephen Sisk

Program Manager, Windows Live Mail

Tanja talked about many of the basics of the Calendar feature in her first post about the new Windows Live Mail Beta. In this post, I wanted to call out three of more powerful features, specifically:

· Reminders

· Importing & subscribing

· Sharing

Receiving reminders

Having one place to track all your upcoming events, appointments, and birthdays is great, but it’s even better when that place reminds you about them. If you’re signed in to Windows Live Mail Beta, you can receive calendar reminders in three ways:

1. In email

2. On your mobile phone

3. In Windows Live Messenger, if you’re signed in with the same account that has your calendar info

By default, you will receive reminders in email, but if you’d like to receive them on your phone or in Messenger, that’s easy to configure. Just click here:

You might need to sign in on the web page that opens, then just select your preferred delivery methods, and you’re done!

Importing calendars & Subscribing to calendars

Windows Live Mail doesn’t currently include entry points to import or subscribe to calendars, but we will show those calendars once you’ve imported them or subscribed to them via Windows Live Calendar (http://calendar.live.com).

For example, let’s say you wanted to subscribe to a Seattle Seahawks game schedule. In Windows Live Calendar, click on Subscribe:

Then, on the “Import or subscribe to a calendar” web page, fill in the calendar URL, type the calendar name you’d like, pick a color, and click “Subscribe to calendar.”

Voila! The calendar now appears in your Windows Live Calendar list:

And, when you go back to Windows Live Mail, there it is as well:

Note that if you don’t see the new calendar, it means Windows Live Mail needs to sync – the easiest way to force that is to go to your Inbox and then back to Calendar. You could also select “Sync all calendars” on the Tools menu.

To import a calendar, you would follow the same process, just select the “Import from an ICS file” on the “Import or subscribe to a calendar” web page. Importing a calendar is a onetime operation and the events will not be updated when changed on the original calendar. Importing is a great mechanism for moving calendar data to Windows Live from another online calendar product. Search help in your previous calendar for “export ical” to learn how to save your calendar into an ics file which Windows Live Calendar can import.

Sharing calendars

We often hear users clamoring for the ability to share a calendar with spouses, friends, or co-workers. Through Windows Live Calendar, you can do this, and Windows Live Mail will show those calendars and give you full power to edit them and keep them up-to-date.

For example, I’ve got a calendar where I track my daughters’ activities (gymnastics, art class, and the like) and it’s been super useful for me to share that with my husband. Here’s how I did that:

In Windows Live Calendar, I clicked on “Share” and selected the Girls calendar:

On the “Sharing settings” page, I selected the “Share this calendar” radio button and the “Share your calendar with friends and family” checkbox.

I typed in my husband’s email address and selected which permission level to give him.

I clicked “Save” and was done. My husband then received an email inviting him to share the calendar, he accepted, and the Girls calendar showed up in his calendar list in both Windows Live Calendar and Windows Live Mail. In Windows Live Mail, we’re both able to add events or edit events, really helping the two of us make sure we’ve got our girls in the right place at the right time each week.

So, there you go – hope this helps you take further advantage of Windows Live’s new calendar features. And thanks, as always, for being a beta user!

Stacia

Last week, we released a Beta version of Windows Live Mail – and one of the main reasons we do that is to get some feedback from our customers on the issues they’re seeing, what they like and don’t like, what features they’d like to see, etc…  In a nutshell, we want our customers to tell us what they think!

So, if we’re going to ask you to send us feedback on our product, we had better offer you ways to do that, right?  Right – and that’s what this blog post is essentially about.  We have a few common ways to get feedback from our customers, and I wanted to take a minute to go through all those so you will know where you should go for the different types of info you might want to share with us about the latest release.

If you aren’t new to the Beta program, most of this info likely won’t be new to you.  If you are new, however, I hope the information below will be helpful to you when deciding how to send issues to the product team.

Newsgroup

This is where you should go if you want to discuss a specific issue that you’re seeing in the product with other beta testers and the product team. The product team spends a lot of time here, particularly during Beta releases, to look into the issues that you all are describing.  Please rest assured that even though you might not see a response from someone on the product team for every issue, we are looking at them and filing them away so we can do further investigation.

There are two ways to access our public newsgroup…  The first is through the web.  The second is by using Windows Live Mail as your newsreader.  Getting this setup is really simple – here are the steps you should follow:

1. Launch Windows Live Mail and click on “Newsgroups” in the lower-left corner

2. In the left pane, there is an option for “Microsoft Communities” – click on that and click on the “View Newsgroups” button.

3. search for “Windows Live Mail” and double click on the option for microsoft.public.windows.live.mail.desktop and click OK to close the dialog box

That’s it!

Support

If you’re experiencing an issue that is blocking you from using the product and you need an immediate resolution (i.e. you can’t sign in, you’re getting sync errors, etc…), you should contact our support team for help. If it’s not critical and it’s just a bug in the Beta product that you want the product team to know about, then the newsgroup is probably the better place to go for this.

Follow this link to get to our support page.  When there, fill out the form with all your details and someone from our Support team should get back to you shortly to help resolve the issue or gather more information from you if necessary.

Feedback

This is where you should go when you just want to send us your thoughts about the product as a whole, or about specific features (good/bad, I like this feature/I hate this feature, I’d like to see this in the feature/I wish you’d take this out of the feature, etc…).  You can get to the feedback site by going through our Help menu:  Help –> Send feedback…

One important thing to note about this feedback option…  The product team won’t be able to respond to you through this channel.  All of your personal information (like email, name, etc…) is stripped from your feedback so we have no way of contacting you to gather more information.  So, if you are reporting a problem that you might need help with, please use the newsgroups or support instead. 

Hope this was helpful!

Tanja – Windows Live Mail Program Manager

As we talked about yesterday, we on the Windows Live Mail team are excited about our new calendar features and hope you enjoy trying it out during our beta.  In particular, we think you’ll like that everyone who signs into Windows Live Mail with a Live ID will have their calendar synced with Windows Live Calendar. I use this feature to check my calendar when I’m at a friend’s house or traveling.

Later today, around 3 PM Pacific Time, the Windows Live Calendar service will also be adding some exciting new features. During this time, it won’t be available for access via the http://calendar.live.com website and Windows Live Mail won’t be able to sync your calendar with the service. We know it is an inconvenience to have the calendar features down so soon after releasing the beta, but there’s a good reason!  We’re doing everything we can to make the experience in both Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Calendar as great as it can possibly be.  We expect that the upgrade will be done by the end of today (again, Pacific Time).

While the upgrade is being performed, Windows Live Mail will continue to work as normal – you can still look at and edit your calendar via Windows Live Mail and any changes you make to your calendar will be saved and uploaded to the Windows Live Calendar service once the server is back up. What you will notice is a small error notification when Windows Live Mail attempts to sync with the calendar service. This also won’t affect your Hotmail or other email accounts.  The Windows Live Calendar blog will also have information about the release.

Once the new calendar service has finished its upgrade, we encourage you to try out the new Windows Live Calendar website. We think you’ll like it! Windows Live Mail will continue to work with the new calendar service just like it did before the upgrade.

Thank you for your patience while we upgrade our service!

Stephen Sisk
Program Manager, Windows Live Mail

It has been a long time since you last heard from us, hasn’t it?  Probably way too long, I know… 

But, the good news is that we’re back now and have some very exciting news to share with you today!  After lots of hard work from the Windows Live Mail team, we are so thrilled to release a new Beta which you can download today.  The team has been chugging away over the last few months and we think you’re really going to love what we have to offer.  In addition to a new Beta for Windows Live Mail, many of the applications in the Windows Live Suite are also releasing Beta installs today.  Take a look at the blog post on Windows Live Wire for more details…

I’m sure you all can’t wait to get started, and I won’t make you read this whole blog post to get the download details…because I’m just nice like that.  Click here to download the latest and greatest Windows Live Suite Beta!

Here are just a few bookkeeping details for you:

Build #: 14.0.5027.0908 (just refer to it as build 0908)

Languages:  English, Brazilian, French, German, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish, Serbian (Cyrillic and Latin), Italian, Hindi, Japanese and Korean…whew!

Upgrading:  You should be able to upgrade from Windows Live Mail v1 to this Beta.  That said, this is a Beta release so you might want to backup your data every now and again…

OK, so what’s new?

We received so much great feedback from our customers since the last release (THANK YOU!), and we’ve spent the majority of the time since our last release reviewing that feedback to help us determine what to add in the next version.  We hope you like what you see…  

Suite Installer

Outside of the sleek new design of the setup experience, you will notice that there a few brand new apps being offered for your downloading pleasure.  I’m not going to go into the details of each one of these apps right now as there are WAY too many features to point out, and this blog post would just end up being incredibly long.  Also, I will point you to a site where you can read more about each of these apps and the great features they have to offer.  You can also click on each app in the setup dialog to read a quick blurb about it…

As you can see from the image below, you can pick and choose which Windows Live apps you’d like to try out.  Of course, we highly recommend giving them all a try!

Calendar – yes, a built-in Calendar!

I can safely say that this feature was by far the most widely requested feature from our customers since we started releasing Windows Live Mail publicly…and because of that, we put lots of our team’s resources on making this feature happen.  Windows Live has a Calendar service that can be accessed through the web (i.e. through http://calendar.live.com) and now through the Windows Live Mail UI.  We’re using this service as our backend which is incredibly useful since it means that you can access your calendars and events either through the Web or Client UI.

As you can imagine, there are a number of features that are included as part of the overall calendar experience…  I’ve highlighted a few of them below, but I am not going to go into too much detail for any one of them at this time.  As the Beta goes on, we’ll keep posting to our team blog with more in-depth information about each of these features. 

Sync with Windows Live Calendar service on the web

When you first sign in to Windows Live Mail with your Windows Live ID, we will automatically import any calendars that might be associated with that account so you can see them right away in the Calendar view!

And, of course, any changes to your calendars made from either Windows Live Mail or http://calendar.live.com will sync regularly to help you keep all your events up to date.

Offline support

Just like email in Windows Live Mail, one of the major benefits of using a client calendar is that you have offline support.  So, when you need to see the details about an upcoming event, no need to worry about having internet access – all the details can be viewed while offline as well!

Birthday and holiday calendars

Adding Events

There are lots of ways to add events to your calendar – so we thought it might be useful to mention all the different options here.

Event Dialog

When you’re in Calendar view and click on the “New” button in the toolbar, you’ll get the New Event dialog. This dialog is full of options to help you make sure each event has all the info you need to get you where you need to be on time.

1) Set start and end time for an event, or you can make it an all day event which is great for those out of town excursions…

2) Choose which calendar you’re adding this event to.  The initial option will be your primary calendar – but you can change that by selecting the dropdown next to the “All day” checkbox.

3) Create a recurring event.  We’ve provided some common recurrence options, like daily, monthly, yearly, etc…, but you can also choose the “custom” option in the dropdown to create your own for those events that might have an odd schedule.

4) Set yourself a reminder – You can choose how much in advance you’d like to be reminded of an event, and then modify your account to send you reminders through email, Messenger toast or even to a mobile device – or even all 3 if that helps!

Quick Add

What’s even cooler is that you don’t have to open the event dialog to create a new event. All you need to do is select a time or date in the calendar and start typing a subject for that event. You can even drag your mouse across the times/days that the event will take place and an event will be added to your calendar that spans that timeframe – we call this feature “swipe and type”. :-)

“Add to Calendar” button

When you receive an email that has information about an event in it and you want to add it to your calendar, just click on the “Add to calendar” button in the toolbar.  This launches an event dialog - and with a few additional clicks you now have all the info you need in your calendar.

Similarly, when you have an event in your calendar that you want others to know about, you can just select that event in your calendar and click on the “Send in e-mail” button in the toolbar.  This launches a compose note with all the event details in the body so you can pass the message along to all your contacts!

Easy Event Editing (is that a tongue-twister?)

To edit an event, you can double click on it – and this will launch the event dialog again and you can modify it in any way you see fit…

OR

if all you need to do is update the time/date of an event, you can drag and drop it to the new time! Easy as pie…

Selecting calendar colors

Because we are sure you will be so excited about the calendar that you’ll be creating many to manage all your upcoming events, we wanted to make it easier for you to easily distinguish which events belong to which calendars.  So, when you create a new calendar, you can choose which color you’d like to use for those events.

Shared Calendar

Through the Windows Live Calendar service on the web, you can create a calendar that will be shared with your contacts.  This is super handy for families to keep track of everyone’s busy schedules…  Any changes made to a shared calendar through Windows Live Mail will show up on the calendars of anyone else who is subscribed to that calendar.

Contacts

We’ve also made a few updates to our Contacts view, particularly in the way we represent the online status for your Messenger contacts.  If you’re a Messenger user, you will see similar visual changes there…

New UI

First off, you’ll notice that your Messenger contacts no longer have a Messenger pawn next to them to display status information!  We’ve removed the pawns in favor of a design where the status of the contact is represented right on their user tile.  And if you’re using the list view (instead of the Tile view), the status is represented by a color and not by the Messenger pawn.

Here’s a quick rundown of what each of these colors means…

Favorites

In the contacts view, there is a new category labeled “Favorites”.  The cool thing about this category is that any contacts that you add here, either through Messenger or Mail, will show up in both locations.  So, for example, if I add someone to my Favorites category through Messenger – the next time my contacts sync in Mail, I’ll see the updates there as well.  This is a nice and easy way to quickly access the contacts that you interact with most frequently across multiple apps…

Send us feedback!

If you aren’t new to the Beta program, many of these options won’t be different from what you’ve seen in the past…  If you are new, however, here’s the quick and dirty guide to how to get feedback to the product team.  All of these options are available through the Help dropdown in Windows Live Mail.  (I’ll be doing another blog post shortly to walk through each of these in more detail…)

Newsgroup: This is where you should go if you want to discuss something that you’re seeing in the product with other beta testers and the product team. It’s great for talking about a feature or trying to see if someone else is also experiencing the same problems you are.

Feedback: This is where you should go when you just want to send us your thoughts about the product as a whole, or about specific features (good/bad, I like this feature/I hate this feature, I’d like to see this in the feature/I wish you’d take this out of the feature, etc…). The product team won’t be able to respond to you through this channel, so be aware of that.

Support: If you’re experiencing an issue that is blocking you from using the product and you need an immediate resolution (i.e. you can’t sign in, you’re getting sync errors, etc…), you should contact our support team for help. If it’s not critical and it’s just a bug in the Beta product, then the newsgroup is probably the better place to go for this.

That’s about it for now!  Can’t wait to hear what you think…so please send us feedback!

Tanja – Windows Live Mail Program Manager

Woo-hoo, finally! After 2 betas and months spent focusing on all your feedback and reported bugs, figuring out thorny legal issues, going through triple checks with the Secure Windows Initiative (SWI) guys and basically burnishing and polishing the product; We’re excited and proud to announce the release of Windows Live Mail. The final bits can be downloaded here. Just click the download button and the rest is gravity.

Since we launched Beta 2 in September, we’ve focused on performance, stability and your most important bugs. We knew that first and foremost, you wanted a fast, great email program to connect to your hotmail, gmail and other personal accounts; not to mention that email server you’re running in your basement at home. We’re really proud of our core email and contacts experience and want to thank you for helping us make the tradeoffs that will make you love the application. Additionally, most of you already know all the OTHER juicy things we do, but for the uninitiated; we have also thrown in a huge improvements for sending and viewing photos via email, added RSS support, improved our newsgroup support for the port 119 jockeys, integration with Windows Live Messenger (view presence, start an IM from WLM, etc), Windows Live Writer (start a blog post from an email) and Windows Live Photo Gallery (view attached pictures in gallery). The list of features and improvements goes on for quite bit. You can find a description here. Our previous blog posts also go into some detail, subscribe to the feed and dig in to find out more.

About 2 years ago, as a company, we decided that we needed to rationalize the different investments we had in the email space. We had servers (hotmail, Exchange), we had multiple email clients (Windows Mail, MSN Explorer, Outlook, Hotmail etc) and a ton of stuff in between. Out of some of that thinking came the future of consumer client email per Microsoft: Windows Live Mail. I remember moving from the Windows team and moving into my Windows Live digs and wondering what the heck we were going to build. After a few months of kicking prototypes around we decided that we would codename the project – and came up with ‘Elroy’, the preteen character from the Jetsons – we were officially building email for the future. We haven’t called it that in a long time, but that has still been our focus and it’s been quite a journey with really incredible twists and turns. One of my favorite dumb ideas was when we decided to ship an orange email client – we were going to shock the world with our quirky boldness. Fortunately for us (and for you) we ultimately decided against it.

Ok, let’s quickly do some book keeping:

Language support: Windows Live Mail is available in 59 markets and 35 languages; the full complement. Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian (Bokmal), Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian – Latin, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian

Upgrading the beta: We recommend that you do an uninstall of beta 2 before you install the final version (no worries, your email and data will be preserved). We appreciate your willingness to rock the beta and while it’s been pretty solid, it’s still possible you may experience some strange behavior during upgrade – we optimize the best experience for final installs of our software. Of course upgrades are supported and our support reps are standing by to help on the off chance you run into any issues.

Feedback: Blog comments are great and you can also go to our feedback website here.

We want say a big “Thank You!!” for hanging in there with us. You cheered us on, gave us a hard time and more importantly, used the product. We could not have done this release without you – you complete us :). We hope you love the application and pass it on to your friends and family. And if you don’t, let us know why. We’re always listening and you know version 2 is coming. ‘Smatteroffact we’re already hard at work planning the next set of features. We really want to solve some of the next generation email needs and do more to achieve our vision of software + services; our goal is to make your online life smooth like butter. If you have some insight on what you’d like to see, drop us a line. Remember, there are no guarantees, except that we’re listening. Hard. Stay tuned as we ramp up on delivering the next version of Windows Live Mail.

The product team members who have been working tirelessly on the Product for the last 1+ year have thought hard about their favorite features in Windows Live Mail. Here are some of our own best-loved things about the product:

“Mmm, all my (eight!) email accounts in one convenient place, what’s not to like? Additionally the UI kicks ass! Huge improvement over the previous stuff we’ve done. Can’t wait to make it even better for the next release.” Oji, Program Manager

“We hope you love this product as much as we have loved building it!  Enjoy!” Andy, Developer

“I really enjoyed working on the Messenger integration. It's so cool to give our customers a one-stop-shopping experience for getting in touch with their friends!” Stephen, Developer

“I was impressed by how readily the product team embraced the value of usability testing. We had a lot of support for testing not only the working code, but a lot of exploratory concepts as well. The result is a really solid, tested, user experience. We could always do more usability testing, but I’m happy to say that we really did a lot, and I think it shows.” Michael, UX Researcher

“Autodiscovery of account settings is my favorite feature for people who haven’t tried Windows Live Mail yet.  For a lot of common email service providers, WLM knows what the account settings should be and just sets it up for you.  No more trying to copy port settings from a help page!” Stacey, Developer

“Photo E-mail is the feature I’m most excited about because it delivers an elegant solution to the all too common, ‘how am I going to e-mail all these huge photos to my friends’ dilemma.” Rocky, Tester

“I am really very excited in releasing the Windows Live Mail Client to the entire world. This is an excellent client for OE users and I hope everyone will enjoy using it.” Manish, Tester

“My favorite, not so useless feature, is switch language on the fly. If you have Windows configured with two or more languages, just hit ALT SHIFT after opening a new compose window to toggle to your second language. And that’s it, you’re ready to type in your other language, with spell check and all! OK. Photomail is cool too! And so is Word Wheel! And most importantly, it’s fast! :)" Christian, Dev Manager

“I am very proud of the product we are shipping, it’s easy to come to work every day when you know the impact you are going to have in people’s daily lives through software.” Carmen, Program Manager

“Windows Live Mail is making its debut from the very beginning as a truly global product.  It is very exciting to be shipping the very first release in 35 languages and 59 markets.  I can’t wait for the world to see and use our awesome product.” Adam, Developer

From the entire Windows Live Mail team, we hope you love what we’ve built.

Written by:

Oji Udezue, Program Manager

It’s been about 3 months since our last Beta release for WL Mail, and I know that many of you have been eagerly awaiting an update.  Well, wait no more!  Today we’re releasing an updated Beta build for Windows Live Mail!

Since I’m sure many of you are visiting this site just to find out where you can download it…I won’t make you wait any longer for that info.  Click here to get the latest build!  Here are the build specifics...  Build #: 12.00.1365 (just refer to it as build 1365); Languages available:  all English markets

What’s New?

Since we released our first WL Mail Beta on May 31^st, we’ve gotten some incredible feedback from our Beta testers about what they liked and didn’t like.  We’ve taken a lot of that feedback to heart – and with this latest build, I think you’ll see some newly added functionality to our existing features, but also fixes for a number of the top customer-reported issues.  

So, without further adieu…here are some additional details on some of the new features/fixes you can expect to see with this build!

Setup

Though not exactly an update to WL Mail, it is an update to the Windows Live Suite install experience – and is definitely worth mentioning.  With this Beta release, you can now choose from a list of Windows Live applications (which includes Messenger, Writer and Photo Gallery), and install them all at once.

After selecting which applications you would like to download, the new install experience will begin – downloading and installing all apps with just one click of the button!  You no longer need to go back and forth to the install pages to get all the products that you want…  And after it’s done installing, you can launch them directly from the dialog box that appears.

Contacts Updates

List View

We’ve added a List View to Contacts!  A LOT of request came in for this feature since our last release – so here you have it!

In the toolbar, just click on the “View” dropdown and choose the “List view” option.

The List View in Contacts is similar to other list views in Windows.  You can click on the column name to sort by that item.  You can also right click on the column headers to add and remove columns.

You can also have the Preview Pane open in addition to the List View.  This is incredibly useful for viewing the details of each contact without having to open a separate window.  To get the view below, just click on the “View” dropdown in the toolbar again and select the “Show preview pane” option.

Import/Export

Another huge request in the Contacts space was to provide more options for importing and exporting contacts.  Here are the new options available to you!

Customize Toolbar

Now you can pick and choose which buttons you would like to have visible to you in the Toolbar.  Here’s how you can do this yourself…

1. Click on the “Show Menu” button in your Inbox, and choose the “Customize Toolbar” option.
2. A dialog will open that offers additional buttons that you can now move to your toolbar to make your WL Mail experience much more productive.  Just add or remove to the “Current buttons” list to make this look exactly how you’d like…

Quick Views

Quick Views will allow you to view mail from all your different accounts in one location, rather than having to switch between folders in your folder list.  With this release, we’ve included a couple new options…“All Drafts” and “All Junk E-mail”.  Their addition allows you to use Quick Views as a complete aggregate of all your mail accounts – similar to the experience you had with Local Folders in OE (where you were offered All inbox, All drafts, All junk e-mail, and All sent items).

1. To get to these new options, right click on the “Quick Views” header in your Folder List and choose the “Select quick views” option.
2. From here a dialog box will open where you’ll be able to choose which other Quick View folders you’d like to have in your Folder List.

Improved Layout Dialog options

We wanted to make it easier for you to be able to choose the way your Inbox looks since there are quite a few options, and it’s kind of hard to know section is going to be modified until after you’ve already selected one of the options.  With our new Layout Options dialog box, you can easily see what options are available to you for every section in the Inbox.

Change your sign-in account

Now you can switch which account you’re signed in with directly from the “Me” area in the upper-right hand corner of the application window. 

Just click on the account you’re currently signed in with, and in the menu that appears, choose to “Change the sign-in ID”.

Photo E-Mail Updates

We’ve made a lot of improvements to the Photo E-mail feature since the last beta build.  After you add images to your compose page using the “Add Photos” button in the toolbar, you will see many more options that will allow you to customize the way your photos appear. 

Here are some of the new options you’ll see…

We also made some changes to the experience you’ll have when receiving a photo e-mail.  In our previous build, when you received a photo e-mail you had to go online to the slideshow viewer to save the higher resolution version of those images.  With this build, you can just click on each image individually to get the option of saving them.  Or, even better, if you’re using WL Mail you can save them all with just one easy click!

Newsgroup Updates

Bug Fixes!

As usual, most of our other changes in this build will come to you in the form of bug fixes.  Since our last Beta build, we’ve not only included feature updates like the ones listed above – but we’ve also fixed hundreds of bugs within the product. 

It would be impossible to list all these fixes out individually, so I’m just going to point out the ones that we got the most customer feedback on…

• 1)      Sound notification with new email:  This was probably one of our most requested fixes – so hopefully you all will be happy to hear (literally ;-) that the fix for sound notification when you get new mail is now in the builds.
• 2)      APOP fix:  With our previous build, we were a little too aggressive in the way we determined whether or not a customer’s account was enabled for APOP.  Because of this, some of you weren’t able to check mail on some of your POP accounts.  With this build, using APOP is dependent on a user setting.
• 3)      Messages getting stuck in the Outbox:  Lots of customers ran into an issue where messages would get stuck in the Outbox (among other folders), which could block you from being able to send and receive messages in certain situations.  A fix for this issue is now in the build, so you should no longer run into this problem.
• 4)      Quoted-Printable updates:  We have improved the way we handle the quoted-printable encoded Plain Text messages when replying and forwarding to mail. Most notably, we now clearly indicate which portions of the mail should be quoted with the appropriate character (‘<’).

Send us feedback!

As usual – we ask that you continue to send us feedback on this build!  I’ve always said that we take your feedback seriously – and this time is no exception.  And to just give you some idea of how important your feedback is…here is one important statistic for you.  About 25% of the bugs that we have fixed since the last Beta build were ones that came in as requests from our beta testers!  The WL Mail team is really proud of this number because we definitely want to make sure our customers are happy with the product – so often times, the issues that come in from all of you are the ones that we are most excited and happy to fix! 

And just as a refresher…  For those of you not familiar with the Beta feedback processes, here you go!

Newsgroup: This is where you should go if you want to discuss something that you’re seeing in the product with other beta testers and the product team. It’s great for talking about a feature or trying to see if someone else is also experiencing the same problems you are.

Feedback: This is where you should go when you just want to send us your thoughts about the product as a whole, or about specific features (good/bad, I like this feature/I hate this feature, I’d like to see this in the feature/I wish you’d take this out of the feature, etc…). The product team won’t be able to respond to you through this channel, so be aware of that.

Support: If you’re experiencing an issue that is blocking you from using the product and you need an immediate resolution (i.e. you can’t sign in, you’re getting sync errors, etc…), you should contact our support team for help. If it’s not critical and it’s just a bug in the Beta product, then the newsgroup is probably the better place to go for this.

I guess that’s about it for now!  Thank you for testing out the product and sending in your thoughts…

Enjoy the build!  We’re looking forward to seeing your feedback… J

--tanja

The time has finally come to unveil the Beta of Windows Live Mail to the world!

Since I’m sure many of you are visiting this site to find out where you can download it…I won’t make you wait any longer for that info.  Click here to get the latest build! 

Here are the build specifics...  Build #: 12.0.1184.0517 (just refer to it as build 1184); Languages available:  English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese

What’s New?

Just a few weeks ago we made the announcement about Windows Live Mail – and now we finally have the opportunity to let you all dive in and try it out! As I mentioned in the last blog post, WL Mail offers features from Windows Mail, Outlook Express and WLMd, and even includes some new ones. Later in this post you’ll see a quick sampling of just some of the new features that we’ve added.

I’m sure you’ll first notice that WL Mail beta has a lot of similarities to WLMd, but we’ve made quite a few changes since then that I’m sure you are going to notice right off the bat.  I don’t want to spend too much time going into the specifics of each feature (that will come in blog posts down the road…), but I do want to take a little time to go into a few details on some of the Setup and Sign-in changes that we’ve made since those will be the first things you will likely notice.

Setup

We made some updates to the overall setup experience for Windows Live Mail.  This is way different than the setup experience of our products in the past – and it’s new for all the Windows Live clients.  In fact, you should also give some of these other products a try – you’ll see a very similar setup experience for WL Messenger and WL Writer which are also releasing Betas today…congrats to those teams as well!

Here are a few other quick comments about what you might notice during and after setup:

• It’s much faster than it was in the past. Hooray for performance! J
• Shortcuts for Windows Mail and OE will be replaced by WL Mail shortcuts. NOTE – Windows Mail and OE bits will remain on your computer and if you uninstall WL Mail, the old shortcuts will return.
• New Windows Live location in the Start Menu. After you install, you’ll see that there is a new location under All Programs for all the Windows Live clients that you have installed.

Sign-In

Now that you’ve got yourself set up, you’ll notice that we go straight into the sign-in process for WL Mail. 

There are a number of changes that we made to the sign-in experience to try to make this smoother and easier to get you started in Windows Live Mail.

1. Auto-configuration of your accounts. We now recognize a number of different account types and will attempt to auto-configure yours so you don’t have to remember what your incoming and outgoing server information is.
2. Windows Live ID (formerly known as Passport…) signin not required. You can simply use WL Mail with your POP or IMAP email accounts. We do, however, recommend signing in with a Windows Live ID when using WL Mail to get the most out of the product as some features (like Photo E-mail and Contacts sync) work best when you are signed in.
3. Migration of your old accounts. If you’re using a WL ID, we’ll migrate that account over automatically – this is not new. But, now we will also check to see what accounts you’ve used on Windows Mail or Outlook Express as well. If you’ve used any accounts on those apps in the past, we will also attempt to automatically migrate them over as well.

Because of all the changes we’ve made in the Sign-In/Setup experience, we really want to hear what you think about it! If you just want to send us your thoughts – please go here. If you need help with something because you ran into a problem – might be best to try to reach out to the community through the newsgroup.

Now you’re in!

Hopefully this screenshot is enough to entice you to go and install our Beta right away! Like I said earlier, I’m not going to go into too many of the new feature updates in this blog post as those will come to the team blog shortly, but here are some new visual updates that we’ve made to the product.

1) Sleek new frame - The frame of the window is much slimmer and has a sleek new design. Also, if you’re using Vista – we are now Aero-enabled!
2) Improved shortcut buttons - The shortcut buttons now run along the bottom of the folder pane for easier navigation. We think our Outlook users will probably be familiar with this feature.
3) Compact View for folders - From here, you can collapse all your folders for a more streamlined experience, and pick and choose which ones you would like to have accessible when using this view by clicking on the “+” button.
4) No more visual advertisements - You will still see the pane for Active Search on the right hand side of the product, but these can also be turned on/off through the View menu.

Updates to the compose page

1) Stationery button in the toolbar! Now you can easily access all your stationery options directly from the compose toolbar…
2) Improved Spell-checking. With WL Mail, we offer a few built-in spellers depending on which languages you installed. We provide English, French, Spanish, German and Korean at this time (with plans to add more for future releases). Also, we will now support any spellers that you may have downloaded previously!
3) Summary tab for contact info. When choosing a contact to send mail to, now you can easily get to their contact info by double clicking on them – and the real benefit of this is the summary tab which gives you easy access to the data you have about this contact. (This is also available through the contacts view)

Send us feedback!

If you aren’t new to the Beta program, many of these options won’t be different from what you’ve seen in the past… If you are new, however, here’s the quick and dirty guide to how to get feedback to the product team. (I’ll be doing another blog post shortly to walk through each of these in more detail…)

Newsgroup: This is where you should go if you want to discuss something that you’re seeing in the product with other beta testers and the product team. It’s great for talking about a feature or trying to see if someone else is also experiencing the same problems you are.

Feedback: This is where you should go when you just want to send us your thoughts about the product as a whole, or about specific features (good/bad, I like this feature/I hate this feature, I’d like to see this in the feature/I wish you’d take this out of the feature, etc…). The product team won’t be able to respond to you through this channel, so be aware of that.

Support: If you’re experiencing an issue that is blocking you from using the product and you need an immediate resolution (i.e. you can’t sign in, you’re getting sync errors, etc…), you should contact our support team for help. If it’s not critical and it’s just a bug in the Beta product, then the newsgroup is probably the better place to go for this.

And there you have it!

We are super-excited about this Beta release and can’t wait to hear what you think about it as well! Please send us feedback using the above links on what you like and don’t like…

--tanja

Today is an incredibly exciting day for our team as we finally get to talk about what we’ve been working on and to let you know about some of the future plans for our product, especially as Windows Live Hotmail just launched.

In just a few short weeks, a beta release of our new consumer email client – Windows Live Mail – will be available for download!  No longer will there be any such thing as WLMd – that’s all in the past!  Time to look forward… J

I know many of you have been wondering what the team has been up to since we haven’t posted on the Blog or provided a new Beta build to you for a number of months…  Well, hopefully this post will help answer some of those questions for you.  Here’s a small glimpse into what you can expect from the upcoming Windows Live Mail builds…

Name Change

I’m sure one of the first things you’re going to notice is the new name.  But, it’s more than a name – it’s a step forward.  We’re bringing in features from OE, Windows Mail AND Windows Live Mail desktop.

I know some of you saw this coming after WL Hotmail announced their name change from WL Mail.  Back then I couldn’t comment on what the new name would be, but now we can talk a little more openly with you.  The WL Mail team is very psyched about this new name – if for no other reason than it’s just a lot less wordy. ;-)

What You Can Expect

If you’re wondering whether or not all this time we’ve been keeping quiet was just due to the pending name change, I can assure you it’s not.  We have been working hard and the upcoming release will contain a number of new features, as well as some updates to the ones that already existed. 

Windows Live Mail will include all the great features that were available to you in WLMd, plus:

• ·               New and improved UI:  Cleaner design, and now with Aero support!
• ·               Setup and account migration improvements:  Smoother experience overall - you will now have fewer steps in order to get started with the client.
• ·               More parity with OE and Windows Mail:  S/MIME and LDAP support are just two of the features that we’ve been working on for WLM which will bring us more parity with our other free Mail clients.
• ·               Performance and stability:  The new product will be faster and more robust than WLMd.
• ·               No Ads:  Yes, it’s true – there will be no graphical ads in the WLM beta build.

Availability

After all this build-up I bet you’re wondering when you can get it and how…  The download will be available in another few weeks – but it’s not too far off on the horizon!

I can still give a few specific details though so you will know where to go when the build actually is ready…

• ·               WLM downloads will be available from http://get.live.com/betas. 
• ·               Just like WLMd, we will support install on XPSP2 and Windows Vista.

That’s all folks!

I guess that’s about it for this Blog post!  Keep your eyes peeled for install info.  You won’t have to wait very long, and once I have more details for you I will be sure to send out an update…

We are really excited to be getting back out there with a new product and can’t wait to hear what you think!  We have re-enabled “comments” on this blog, so tell us what you think!

See the press release for Windows Live Hotmail which also mentions Windows Live Mail: WL Hotmail Press Release.

Bye for now!

--Tanja

With this build, you’re not going to see a lot of large feature changes.  What you will see, however, is even better - which is, simply put, an improved overall experience while using the product. 

We’ve spent the majority of the time since the last refresh focusing on making WLMd more stable and reliable.  These are the types of changes that our customers may not notice right off the bat.  But, weeks from now you’ll be sitting at your desk (using WLMd, of course) and it will suddenly hit you -

“WOW!”, you’ll say to yourself, “This build is WAY better than the last!  In fact, this one runs more smoothly than any build they’ve ever released!” 

With this latest refresh you’ll see a shortened first run experience, better integration between Windows Live Messenger and WLMd, updates to our interaction with the Search Box, and hundreds of other fixed issues across all of our features…

I also wanted to point out a new option under our Help menu in case you didn’t see it there last time.  As you may have noticed, you can now migrate your Windows Mail data on Vista to WLMd.  Give this a try, and let us know how it works for you.  If you have any trouble, please use the “Migration Failure” option under the Help menu.

Finally, thanks to everyone who’s been submitting issues to the product team through the Connect site!  Since we added this feature, we’ve seen a lot of great issues and suggestions come in.  Please keep it up!  We love to get this type of feedback from our customers… J

--tanja

Every day we get lots of feedback about WLMd in the form of issues, or as we like to call them – bugs. :-)  I’ve posted to the blog in the past about how important your feedback is to us – so I won’t repeat myself and sound like a broken record.  Just note that the statement is still very much true. J

To further prove my point - Microsoft has introduced a service that allows customers to submit and track issues on a product through a site called Microsoft Connect.  This site was used throughout the Beta for Windows Vista – so some of you may already be pretty familiar with it.  But, we’re happy to announce that now ALL of our Windows Live Mail desktop beta testers will be able to use it as well! 

So, what’s the big deal with this Connect site?  Don’t we already have ways of providing feedback?

Customers can participate in Microsoft Connect in lots of ways – but for our purposes, the most important use of this service is to give customers the ability to send in issues to the team about WLMd. 

But, it’s so much more than just being able to send an issue in, since you guys already have lots of ways to do that! 

Here are some of the other feedback actions you can take when you get started with the Connect site:

• Search for an issue.  You have the ability to search through ALL the issues that customers have submitted on our product through the Connect site.  This way you can see if someone else already submitted the issues you’re seeing before going through the steps to do it yourself.  You will also be able to see if the product team updated your issue in any way.
• Vote on an issue.  Say you search for an issue that you were experiencing and find that someone has already submitted it.  You think it’s a particularly painful problem and want to make sure the product team knows that.  Well, the Connect site provides you with the ability to Vote on any issue.  When the “Vote” numbers for go up, the product team can easily see which bugs are getting the most traffic.
• Validate an issue.  Again, if you search and find an issue, you can choose to validate it so the product team will know that the issue reproduces for multiple people.  This helps them understand how to reproduce the bug, especially if it involves different machine configurations or specific build versions.
• Share a workaround.  Finally, if you find an issue and know that there is a way to workaround the problem – then you can share that information with a group of people to help unblock others.

How do I get started?

It’s really simple to get started.  Here’s what you have to do!

1. Navigate to http://connect.microsoft.com
2. Click on Available Connections on the left side of the screen.
3. If the button in the upper right corner of the page says to 'Sign In', click it and log into your passport account.
4. Scroll down the page until you see “Windows Live Mail desktop - Public Beta” under the “Product” column.  It will be near the end of the page.
5. When you find it, click on the text that says “Apply”
6. If you are prompted, please review the “Terms of Use” and click “I Agree” (assuming you agree to the ToU).
7. If this passport account has never been part of the Connect system, you'll be prompted to provide some information regarding yourself. 
8. After you do that, just click “Register”!

Once you are registered – here’s how you can send in feedback:

1. Go to http://connect.microsoft.com
2. In the left side of the page, click on “My Participation”
3. In the list on that page, choose the one for “WLMd – Public Beta”
4. On the left side of the page, click on “Feedback”
5. There is a “Submit Feedback” button on this page – click on that, and follow the instructions to provide feedback.

That's it!  Pretty simple!

Ready to get started??  Hope so – because we’re ready to see the submissions come in!

Have fun – and happy bug filing! J

It’s been just about  6 weeks since our last update.  During that time, we’ve been collecting and reviewing feedback from our customers, and working on getting some of those issues that you’ve been sending in fixed for the new Beta build that is now available on the Ideas site for you to download!

Thank you to our customers!

I first just wanted to take a moment to thank you all for sending in so much feedback about the previous builds that we’ve released.  A large portion of what I do is go through our customer feedback – and I have to say, I’m continually impressed with the level of detail and great ideas that you guys send in!  I know some of you might be wondering if we’re actually taking in all this data you’re sending to us.  Well, I want you all to rest easy and know that we really are listening.  I think you’ll see some incredible updates in this build that address a lot of the issues that you’ve been talking about over the last few weeks.

So, what’s in this new build?

Well, it’s been over a month since we released an update – and the team has been diligently working on fixing lots (and I mean, lots) of bugs!  All in all, we’ve fixed hundreds of bugs since the last build that our Beta testers received!  I think when you install this latest build, you will likely see improvements all over the product – but, as usual, there are a few areas I’d like to specifically point out so you can try them out and give them a real run for their money!

-          Account/Mail Migration

We’ve made a number of bug fixes in this area, but we’ve also added support for some scenarios which weren’t covered in previous builds.  Now when you install WLMd for the first time, we support migration of your Windows Mail accounts if you are running Windows Vista.

-          Minimize to the System Tray (round 2)

Ok, ok…so we know this feature wasn’t perfect in the last build.  We got a lot of feedback on it, and this latest build contains fixes for a lot of the issues you all reported – so give it another shot and let us know if you continue to see problems with the feature.

-          Search updates

The Windows Desktop Search team recently shipped v3.0 of their product, and we made some changes in WLMd to make sure we integrate well with their latest version.  If you’re running Windows XP SP2, please go and download Desktop Search 3.0 and give the Search feature in WLMd a whirl!

-          Message list updates

Two of the biggest customer requests for the Message List were to (a) provide the ability to sort messages by size and (b) give customers a one-line view option so you can have better sorting capabilities.  I’m happy to report that both of these options are now available in this build!  Enjoy!

-          Windows Live Spaces “Friends” Integration

Windows Live Spaces has a “Friends” feature – and for those of you haven’t tried this feature out, you really should!  It’s a very cool way of tagging and keeping in touch with not only your Friends, but also to explore the sites of your Friends’ Friends and build a broader social network.  We wanted to integrate with this feature in WLMd, so now in the Contacts area you will see a link to “Go to your friends list” which launches a new browser window that takes you directly to your Friends list!  Intuitive, right? ;-)

-          General Bug Fix Areas - There are a few other areas where we made a number of general bug fixes, and we’d like to just point them out to you so you can let us know if you think more improvements could still be made…

·         Synchronization – I know a lot of people were running into syncing problems, getting errors and such, and we’ve spent lots of time trying to resolve those – so please just keep an eye on this and let us know if you continue to see issues while sync’ing your mail/contacts/RSS feeds/etc…

·         Performance – This is one area where we made a lot of improvements with the last build, and will continue to work on until we feel like we’ve got it right!  Again, hard to pinpoint a specific thing to focus on – but if you think certain tasks are still slower than you would expect them to be, please let us know what those are so we can make sure to investigate those for future releases.

Have fun! :-)

--tanja