Windows Live Mail

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