Windows Live Mail: Features

Better Together with Active Search

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 13:54:34 GMT

People spend the bulk of their time online doing two things: checking their email and searching the web. We thought we’d bring the two together, so you can use search to act on the ideas and tasks piling up in your inbox.

Today, we’re excited to begin testing a new feature we’re calling Active Search for Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta with a small group of beta participants in the US.

Active Search bridges the gap between your inbox and the broader web using the power of search. Using Active Search is essentially the same as conducting a ton of related searches the old fashioned way – by cutting and pasting terms from your email into a separate web browser – only without all the effort.

Here’s a snapshot of Active Search in action:

Flowers for mom and other neat tricks

Much of what you need to get done online – from planning your next vacation to remembering to buy flowers for your mom on her birthday – is piling up in your inbox, just waiting for you to take action, usually by looking something up on the web.

With this in mind, we’ve designed Active Search to make it easier for you to act on anything that piques your interest while reading your email. That’s why we show you key search terms we find in a message and provide a search box right underneath, so you can quickly search for terms of your own.

We also show search results and sponsored links right inline, so you can see what’s related to your message on the web, without having to open a new browser window. Of course, if you come across something really interesting, just click More results… and we’ll open a new window with a full set of search results for you to dive into.

Because we only look for relevant keywords in the current email message or RSS article you happen to be viewing in your inbox, there are times when we just can’t find anything relevant enough to show you. So we don’t – we just show a search box ready for you to enter search terms you happen to come up with while reading the message.

You’re completely in charge

We believe strongly that users should be in control of their email experience (actually their entire online experience). We felt it was really important that you have the choice and be able to decide for yourself if you find Active Search relevant and useful.

While we hope you find this new feature helpful, we’d rather you decide for yourself. To help you make that choice, when you first start Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta you’ll notice a new email in your inbox that explains how Active Search works and makes clear how you can switch Active Search off or on at anytime.

Don’t like it? Just click on the arrow at the top of the pane. We immediately turn off Active Search and give you the display ad you have today in Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta. Here’s what it looks like:

For your eyes only

While Active Search provides a deeply personalized experience, we know how important your privacy is to you, so we’ve worked hard to ensure comply with Microsoft's Online Privacy Statement which reflects our commitment to ensuring that consumers have the ability to control the collection, use and disclosure of their personal information.

No one, besides you, will see the search terms, sponsored links and search results shown in Active Search because

we rely on computers, not humans, to look for relevant keywords in your email messages and RSS article
we will never trace any keywords we may collect while getting results from our search and advertising services back to the person from whose email they were drawn
we remove any trace of keywords we may collect while getting results from our search and advertising services from your PC every time you clear your Internet Explorer Temporary Internet Files cache or restart Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta
we never share email content (including email addresses) or personally identifiable information from Active Search with advertisers or third parties without your prior permission.

Also, it’s important to know that Active Search:

never looks for keywords at all if you’ve switched Active Search off – really, off means off
never looks for keywords in files attached to your email messages
only looks for keywords in email messages and RSS articles marked as “safe” by our Junk Email Filter
avoids looking for sensitive data like credit card numbers or social security numbers that may pop up in your mail from time to time and for which search results would be of little use.

If you want verification of the way we’re doing things, you don’t have to just listen to us. To help provide an extra level of assurance that we’re meeting the bar we set for ourselves in terms of helping protect your privacy, we have worked with Jefferson Wells, an external consulting company, to conduct a full privacy audit of our Active Search for Windows Live Mail Desktop client component. The results were great and you can find their report on their website.

Better Than a Superbowl Ad

Active Search provides advertisers with a powerful way to reach consumers with text advertising that is very relevant to their daily lives. Contextually targeted sponsored links are shown automatically for the relevant keywords Active Search finds as users read their email; these will be provided by Kanoodle during our beta. Paid search sponsored links are shown whenever users select alternative keywords or enter in their own search terms; these are delivered by Microsoft adCenter.

Let us know what you think

Like other new features in Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta, we’re deploying Active Search to a smaller group of beta participants in the US, randomly selected to test drive the feature.

Being able to compare feedback from participants with and without Active Search will help us learn whether our new features are truly of value to our users. Also, starting with a small group of testers will help us fine tune Active Search for a broader audience when we finally release.

If you’re one of the participants who’ve received an email introducing you to Active Search, feel free to reply it with your comments and ideas. If we haven’t been able to include you in our limited test, feel free to post a comment on our blog.

Cheers,

Active Search for Mail Desktop Feature Team – Oji, Stephen, Alexei, Joshua, Bryan, Manish and Aly

P.S. Roll Credits…Many great people have helped us pull Active Search together and we’re indebted to them for their time, effort and patience. In particular, we’d like to thank Wende, Steve, Sam, Saleel, Ryan, Rob, Paul, Paul, Natala, Mike, Matt, Kim, Karen, Irving, Gail, Frank, Ewa, Ethan, Eddie, Diane, Denise, David, David, Dave, Christopher, Chris, Brooke, Brian, Bill, Betsy, Anjali and Austina. We’ll definitely be knocking on your door for help with v2.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 23:10:10 GMT

And we want to make it easy for our customers to share those pictures. You’ll discover that with Mail Desktop Beta (Windows Live Mail Desktop) sharing pictures is super easy.

The common situation now? (at least for me )

I take a TON of pictures. Don’t you? Digital cameras make it almost too easy to take 100, 200, sometimes 500 pictures in just a few days. Now, I am not suggesting that you should share all of those; I am sure some of those should be kept private ;). But you always have at least a handful that you want to send to your friends and family. Right now it is a BIG pain.

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

Hey, “Blog it!”

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 18:51:30 GMT

Ok, I admit it…I can be lazy. I hate dealing with sign-in, I hate dealing with multiple windows, I hate hassle. I love reading interesting stuff and sharing it with my friends. Until recently I had 2 options:

Open up email, create new email, copy and paste the article into email, add friends, and send
Open up my Space (http://spaces.msn.com/vladka), sign-in, create a new entry, copy and paste the article, hit publish.

Phew…too much work! Remember, I don’t like hassle. I am so happy we finally got the “Blog it” feature working in Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta. Now when you get an interesting email from a friend, or read something cool via RSS it is a two-click process to share it friends.

Notice, the easy “Blog it” button in the action bar ? Simply click it—it’ll take you directly to your Space. With all the text prepopulated!
All you have to do is click [Publish entry] and you are done!

Now that’s a feature to blog about…

-Vlada Breiburg