We’ve finally done it! Our ‘little’ project to bring you the next generation consumer mail application is going public. As of today (actually we slipped it out quietly last week or so) we are instituting a hassle-free sign up for the Mail Desktop beta. No beta invitation emails are necessary. Simply go through the process below and you should be up and running in minutes*.

1. Go to http://ideas.live.com
2. Find the tile for “Windows Live Mail Desktop beta”
3. Click on “sign up” (if you’re NOT signed in with your Passport email address)
4. Click on “download” (if you ARE signed in with your Passport email address)
5. Walk through the beta agreement and accept.
6. Download and you’re done!
7. Be sure to sign into Mail Desktop with the Passport email address you used in step 3 and 4.  

We’re driving hard toward our version 1 release and we need your help to locate those hard to find issues that you care about the most and to tell us what you think. We’re confident that you will find the beta very usable and we promise to send you a refresh very soon (plenty of new goodies on the way!).

In case you’ve forgotten, here’s some of the great things you get with Live Mail Desktop now:

• Junk and phishing protection
• Support for RSS feeds
• Photo email (share & publish your photos as slideshows to the internet!)
• Blog it!
• 3 pane view of email
• Integration with Windows Live Messenger
• Active Search
• Multiple account aggregation
• Instant Search
• Free client access to your hotmail account
• Lots more and with even more to come!  

One more thing: our beta is supported. If you run into any problems, use this link to get support –  http://support.live.com/eform.aspx?productKey=wlmaildesktop. We even have a support blog - here.

Download and send us feedback at wlmdb@microsoft.com . For more on sending feedback, see a previous blog post, here.  We can’t wait to hear from you. Spread the word.