Microsoft has released into limited BETA testing the upcoming replacement to the current free email / news client - Outlook Express 6. It's called Windows Live™ Mail Desktop Beta and is designed to provide a seamless experience between offline email management and the new Live™ family of services.

Even though the upcoming Windows Vista has an existing email client built into the OS called (what else?) Windows Mail, this client is designed to bring a user's email / contacts from Hotmail or MSN / IE7 news feeds and even WebSearch all in to one UI.

Here's the official feature comparison list:



The UI is akin to the new Windows Live Messenger 8, which although looks very pretty, also turns off power users with its wanton waste of screen real-estate. Major cons include the inability to customize toolbars with buttons of choice / inability to add a SIZE column to the message list pane to show the size of the message / lack of the VIEWS dropdown box thru which one could easily switch between various views such as Unread Messages or Flagged Messages etc.

The most major negative in this however will be the Active Search pane on the side which will go thru the contents of the email / news post you're reading and display relevant adverts while you're NOT searching. One can opt to turn off the Active Search pane entirely which the developers promise will result in NO info being scanned.





And that's only the stuff that I've gleaned from playing with it for 45 minutes.

Now for the plus points:

+Built-in anti-spam and phishing filter. Sounds good but the true test lies in how well it functions.

+Neat integration with your Hotmail account. I like the ability to automatically sync your local address book with that on your Hotmail/Windows Live Mail online address book

+Better integration of the Messenger services. Also useful is the Blog This! button which allows for easy publishing of content from within the client to your SpacesBlog.

+ New Photomail feature enables the user to make slideshows of images and makes it easier to edit and embed images with effects directly into the email message.


So far, it's best use would be for newbies who've cut their teeth on web-based UIs and need more power such as the ability to use filters and different views to manage their email and also for people who need the offline capability to store and download email. Not for the power user, but then if you were one, you'd be using Thunderbird, Outlook or The Bat!.

Still needs to be improved and it will be but at least Win XP users will have a nice pretty interface without upgrading to Vista for the Windows Mail OE look-alike.

yeah dude i have heard about live beta desktop thinge .. its good unless u dont found any worm in it..
also heard that it has many features as compared to Outlook Xpress

I'm not a big fan of offline email managers, mainly because they aren't very useful at all unless you're using a travelling laptop or PocketPC. It's not very hard to excess webmail online and only takes a few seconds even for a dial-up user. (minutes maybe?)

Even so, i have to comment on the design of the latest "Live" Windows programs. It is nonetheless fancier and boasts more function than its predecessors but it still lacks flexibility. I wouldn't be surprised if there will be ads being squeezed all over the programs.

Microsoft should also give in to the other 80% of the world not using Hotmail or MSN anymore and start supporting other email services such as Gmail or AOL and AIM. Hotmail is so full of ads i should think it is considered "unclean" now. Plus, many American users still use America Online, which provides an aol.com email address, which they often use because of it's simplicity and seemingly endless storage (Should be 2 Gigabytes).

Microsoft had better buckle-up, the world is a rough ride for them now.

Despite all the security vulnerabilities over the years, the clunky interface, and the near-glacial pace of improvements to the program, I still use Microsoft Outlook as my sole email client. And I love Outlook.
So far I have used Outlook 2003 and it's stable, pretty fast, as secure by default as anything else, and has the ability to plug extensions right into the UI. These things are not true for other email programs.

Techocian: I beg to differ. Knowing from previous experience that getting and keeping a reliable internet connection are two different things, I'll have to tell you that having your email downloaded to your PC makes it that much easier to read/print something out rather than going online. I'll even venture so far as to say that it also is much faster to access your email when it's on your local HDD than on a server which you might access at a megabit connect too...
And what about the times where one can't get online (perhaps the phone line is down / the ISP is performing maintenance etc.) ??


Regarding your proposed shift of strategy for Microsoft, just one word as a question - WHY?

Why shouldn't they try to integrate and promote their own services? It doesn't make good business sense not to int his day and age.

I don't know about your source of statistics, but I'll quote mine here (Granted, it's a little dated at about five months ago but it's the latest one I could find). According to that, MSN Messenger leads the pack by quite a margin.

You also mentioned "80% of the world" and then promptly talked about AOL and AIM which are two sides of the same coin - a mainly US service provider.

All MS email clients offer the ability to download mail from GMail using POP3 access. As I'm not familiar with AOL Mail and whether or not they offer POP3 / IMAP4 access, I can't really get back to you on that issue except to say that it also depends on the mail service provider to allow the users different ways to access their email.

The new Windows Live Mail will be available with a 2 GB mailbox.

Finally, advertising: Which raised more controversy - image and banner adverts in Hotmail / Yahoo etc. or targeted contextual text-ads in GMail? The latter did and still does, inspite of Google's assurances that no "person" reads the content of the emails.

Nothing worthwhile comes for free. If you want all the features then you need to pay the price in one form or the other. Of course, if adverts bother you, I'd advise you to use Firefox and the Adblock extension or something similar. If you're an IE user, consider using a shell like Maxthon Browser wherein you can attempt to keep the adverts at bay.

I hope this answers some of the interesting points raised by you.

This post has been edited by sparx: Jun 27 2006, 07:56 AM