Windows Live Mail: Computers and Internet

Our Beta is public!

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 03:53:01 GMT

Hello there,

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*.

Go to http://ideas.live.com

Find the tile for “Windows Live Mail Desktop beta”

Click on “sign up” (if you’re NOT signed in with your Passport email address)

Click on “download” (if you ARE signed in with your Passport email address)

Walk through the beta agreement and accept.

Download and you’re done!

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.

*Direct sign up is only available if your Passport is a US Passport. We’re working to make this more broadly available. If you do not have a US Passport, you will be automatically directed to our waiting list. Once you submit your email address, we will send you an invitation as soon as we can

*Windows Live Custom Domains and MSN premium accounts are not supported by the beta program at this time.

- Oji

Channel 9 Video on Active Search!

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 15:52:27 GMT

Channel 9 Video on Active Search!

We released a Channel 9 video on the Active Search for Windows Live Mail Desktop feature. See video...

Here is the link to the blog post giving the details about the feature.

-Bryan

Bryan Starbuck

http://spaces.msn.com/BryanStarbuck

Tags: [Windows Live Mail Desktop, Active Search, Contextual Advertising]

Channel 9 Video for MoreThanMail

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 23:53:29 GMT

Our team has published a Channel 9 video listing the new features in Windows Live Mail Desktop beta. This is a great chance to get a tour of the features that are being released.

This video covers most of our current features. A few are not shown, such as Active Search (see blog post on that feature).

The WLDM Channel 9 video is available here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=200389

-Bryan

Bryan Starbuck

http://spaces.msn.com/BryanStarbuck

Tags: [Windows Live Mail Desktop, RSS, Windows Live, Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Windows Vista]

Where did we come from? Where are we going?

Fri, 03 Mar 2006 22:29:07 GMT

Windows Live gives our team new ways to innovate quickly and get those improvements to our customers. It's a good time to look at a little into our past, in order to see what will be in Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta.

The History

The same team that brought you Windows Mail in Vista is now releasing our next generation mail client. We took all of the learning from our experience developing the many versions of Outlook Express, the improvements we made when we released Windows Mail (OE’s new name) in Vista and used that knowledge to build a new mail experience we think is very special and cool.

Great places to learn about the improvements made in Windows Mail in Vista are covered here:

An overview of Windows Mail in Windows Vista: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/features/forhome/mail.mspx
I made several posts on my personal blog covering the features in Windows Vista: http://spaces.msn.com/BryanStarbuck/
This Channel9 video will provide demos of the features and will go into technical details of the product: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=116711

The feature list below will show the feature evolution between Windows XP's Outlook Express, Windows Vista's Windows Mail, and Windows Live Mail Desktop.

RSS

The new RSS feature is one I use often. Different people like to read RSS in different ways. Internet Explorer v7 (download here) has a new innovative way to switch from a web site to its RSS feed. Their approach is innovative and will build a following. My personal preference is for Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta's traditional model using folders, read/unread list, and a preview pane.

Here is what is possible in the RSS feature of Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta:

When I see a blog entry I like, I can click "forward" and email it to my friend.
I can click "Reply" and let the blog author know what I think about that post. Reply is invaluable in email, why not have it for blogs?
Quick Search Box: There is a box in the top of the email client. As you type, the list of messages are filtered so only the messages that include the search text are shown. For RSS this will search the title and blog description.
Map feeds to folders: Windows Live Mail Desktop allows you to map several feeds to a single folder if you want. This is a great way to reduce the number of folders to eliminate scrolling. Separate folders often aren't needed for feeds that receive posts infrequently.
Traditional support: All of the features you expect from most RSS readers, including drag & drop to folders, read/unread, folders to organize subscriptions.
Blog It!: This is a very cool feature. Vlada on our team worked on this feature and she will tell you all about it soon.

Blog sites should supply the email address and names in their RSS feed if they would like the reply by email feature to fill in the "TO:" line when the user clicks Reply. ArsTechnica on feedburner.com is a good example of a compatible feed. We use the Internet Explorer v7 RSS platform which normalizes the blog XML.

To Enable RSS items to support "Reply by Email":

RSS 0.9x & RSS 2.0: channel/managingEditor and item/author should contain the author in the form "email (full name)".
RSS 1.0: Work the same except by using the elements channel/dc:creator and item/dc:creator.
Atom 0.3 and 1.0: Stores the name and email address in elements feed/author/name and feed/author/email. (Or set feed/entry/author)

-Bryan Starbuck

http://spaces.msn.com/BryanStarbuck

Tags: [Windows Live Mail Desktop, RSS, Adam, Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Windows Vista]