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