Windows Live Mail

This week, we announced an update to Windows Live Essentials (including the new Windows Live Movie Maker—pretty slick!). It also includes some updates that address customer and compatibility issues in Windows Live Mail.  You can install it from http://download.live.com .

In particular:

• Windows Live Mail can now properly import Outlook Express mail account settings that were transferred from a Windows XP to a new Vista or Windows 7 system using the Windows Easy Transfer wizard.
• Some users had problems launching Windows Live Mail and we have addressed this. In some cases, after you closed Windows Live Mail, the application would appear to close, but the wlmail.exe process would continue to run in the background. That process would prevent Mail from launching in the future.
• On Vista and Windows 7, Windows Live Mail wouldn’t connect properly to POP email servers using SSL. In particular, this affected some users of Yahoo! Mail.

The update is version 2009 (Build 14.0.8089.0726). You can check your current version number in the About Windows Live Mail dialog.

One last thing… we’d like to thank you for your feedback.  We rely on it as we continue to improve your experience using Windows Live Mail.   Thank you for using Windows Live Mail and for helping us build a great product.

Rodger Benson
Lead Program Manager

Hey guys!

A call out to all the superstars out there running Windows Live on 64-bit Win7 Beta/RC:  You may have noticed that the Mail search functionality seems broken.  Although there is a fix that is going to be released, you can fix it yourself quite easily right now by taking the steps outlined in our Knowledge Base (KB) article here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969165.  Follow a  few easy steps, and voila!  You’re up and running again :).

Thanks, and hope you are enjoying Win7!

- Janani

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