Using Windows Live Mail

Windows Live Mail is one of the free programs in the Windows Live Suite and you can download it from www.windowslive.com. Live Mail is the new email client for Windows XP, replacing the old out-moded Outlook Express. With Live Mail you can manage as many email addresses as you like and take advantage of improved security for protection from phishing and emails that could contain malware. As well, you’ll be able to keep up to date when your family and friends on your Messenger contact list update their Live Space with a new text entry or photo album.

The only requirement for running Live Mail is a Windows Live ID so you can sign in. If you’ve got more than one Live ID, choose which one you’ll use for signing in to Live Mail. So the first time you run Live Mail you’ll be asked for this Live ID:

If you haven’t got a Live ID, go to mail.live.com or use the link on Live Messenger to create a new Live ID.

Once you’ve signed in, you might get a dialogue that tells you Live Mail can’t get your mail. This will happen if you haven’t set up your Live Hotmail account. If you’ve already got a Live Hotmail account, then you can skip the following screenshots. However if you later create a new Live ID for yourself, remember to go to Live Hotmail to have it create the appropriate folders so you can get your mail through Live Mail.

Then you’ll be asked if you want to set Live Mail as your normal desktop email client so tick the box to agree. Note that the username of the Live ID in the screenshots below has been hidden.

At this stage don’t panic – you won’t see any mail from your new account but Live Mail has made an entry and is ready once you’ve gone to mail.live.com, signed in with your new Live ID and let Live Hotmail set up its folders.

After you’ve signed in to mail.live.com, you’ll need to chose the classic or full version of Live Hotmail – choose classic if you’re on a dialup line.

Then Live Hotmail will open and show you the folders it’s set up, along with a welcome email in your inbox.

Now bring Live Mail back to the front of your desktop (click its tab on the taskbar) and you’ll be asked to lick the download button to create your Hotmail folders in Live Mail.

Hover the mouse over the Download button to get the full message of what’s going to happen when you click.

After a few moments you’ll have the folders for your next Live Hotmail account set up in Live Mail (colour coded by the way). As well you can read the welcome email that you saw a few moments ago in your Live Hotmail inbox.

At this stage you’ll want to add other email accounts, including the one you have with your Internet service provider, other Live Hotmail accounts or accounts from other providers such as GMail or Yahoo.

Live Hotmail accounts are simple to add – click on Add an e-mail account and fill in your Live ID and password and it’s done. GMail and Yahoo accounts should be just as easy. When adding your Internet service provider email, enter your email address and password and Live Mail will do its best to get other settings from the mail server so you shouldn’t have to enter any other information. However, if Live Mail can’t get other settings (SMTP and POP3 mail server addresses) you’ll have to find them on your ISP’s web site.

Another little job you’ll want to do is set up how you want your layout. You can stay with the layout shown in the screenshot above or, like webDotWiz, you might like to have your reading pane to the right of the message list. So click the button to the left of the help icon.

Then make your choice from the dialogue box.

webDotWiz prefers to leave his list of folders in the left-hand pane, his message list in the second column and use the right-hand pane to display the content of the message currently highlighted in the message list.

You’ll find Live Mail easy to use and, because it can handle all your email addresses, it’s extremely convenient.

Another useful feature is being able to email photos taking into account the speed of your receiver’s connection; if you want to be creative, you can make a slide show of your photos.

webDotWiz mainly uses Live Mail as an RSS reader (that’s how he knows when other webDotWizards have updated their Live Spaces) but we’ll leave that for another post. When you start, though, you won’t have to do anything except to click on Unread feeds to see what your Live Messenger contacts have added to their Live Spaces.

Note: this post is also available for reading at webDotWiz Online – Dec 13 2007 column.

Technorati tags: Windows Live Mail, webDotWiz Online

Windows Live Mail now available

Windows Live Mail is the replacement email client for Outlook Express on Windows XP and the Windows Mail on Vista.

WLM also replaces Windows Live Mail desktop which some of us have been using for some months but WLM in the main keeps all the features we WLMd users have become accustomed to (except, of course, there have been bug fixes such as locking up when adding a new email account – in fact, that was about the only prob webDotWiz ever encountered with WLMd). Anyway, Windows Live Mail is Microsoft’s new email client for both Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Outlook Express users on Windows XP should install Windows Live Mail now (scroll down the page until you find the Windows Live Mail download link) to take advantage of the benefits of Windows Live Mail. You’ll see from the screenshots on Liveside.net that Windows Live Mail makes Outlook Express look like it’s from the ages of the dinosaurs.

To get an idea of what’s going to occur during installation, see the screenshots at More Than Mail (the Windows Live Mail team’s blog Space).

One of the main advantages of Windows Live Mail is that you can set up as many email accounts as you like. At a minimum, you’ll have your Windows Live Hotmail account and your account given by your Internet Service Provider.

To set up accounts, there’s no need to find and enter those obscure mail server settings (which most ISPs seem to always hide away on their web site).

When setting up your email accounts in Windows Live Mail, all you need do is enter your email address and password and WLM will do the rest.

It’s best to use your main Windows Live ID with Windows Live Mail so you can access your calendar, contacts and Messenger associated with that Live ID. Once you’ve started WLM for the day with your main Live ID, you can switch Live IDs in Messenger and still access all your Windows Live Hotmail accounts. Note that you can still access all your Live mail using Windows Live Hotmail, either from your local computer (even when WLM is running) or another computer.

Windows Live Mail has an in-built RSS feed reader and you’ll be automatically kept up to date when your Live contacts update their Live Spaces. Any feeds you’ve subscribed to in Internet Explorer 7 also are accessed by WLM so it’s a good feed reader.

In fact, webDotWiz uses Windows Live Mail mainly for this purpose and has about 105 feeds with info coming to him so he can skim over the titles and read anything relevant without having to attempt to visit 105 sites to see if there’s anything new on the site.

A couple of things to do – change the colour of the main windows (there’s a little paint brush up at the top right) and give each of your email folders their own colour (right-click on the email address folder in the folders pane on the left).

In a word, brighten up your email with Windows Live Mail but remember that Email is only for the oldies so make good use of Live Messenger to contact others.

Technorati tags: Windows Live Mail, RSS feeds, Outlook Express

Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Mail are the official names

We already know that Windows Live Hotmail is the name that’s been decided on for the newly-released web-based email service that we used to know as MSN Hotmail (since 1996 or so). There were a couple of other name changes tried during the testing period but they’re behind us now and we can get back to simply talking about our Hotmail.

On the desktop, though, we’ll have to get used to a new name for the next generation email client to replace Outlook Express and Windows Mail on Vista – watch for Windows Live Mail to be available later in May.

Windows Live Mail will take in many features from Windows Live Mail desktop (WLMd). webDotWiz has been using WLMd for a few months, not so much for email (remember, email is for the oldies) but for the in-built feed reader (RSS) so the information comes to him rather than him having to try to visit  zillions of sites everyday (which is impossible, anyway) to keep up with what’s happening.

For a bit of fun, see the new features in Windows Live Hotmail on http://www.newlivehotmail.com/.

On the more serious side of things, see the It’s Here and the Fun Has Only Just Begun post on the Windows Live Hotmail team space.

Here’s a breakdown of what we can expect in the new Windows Live Mail (available in a few weeks as a trial version so keep an eye on http://get.live.com/betas):

Windows Live Mail will include all the great features that were available to you in WLMd (Windows Live Mail desktop), 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.

There’s more info on the Windows Live Mail team space and Liveside has more info too.

webDotWiz will be one of the first to install Windows Live Mail as soon as it’s available (later this month?) so keep an eye on your webDotWiz RSS feed on your own Space and check http://wlmailclient.spaces.live.com from time to time.

Technorati tags: Windows Live Hotmail. Windows Live Mail, Outlook Express, Windows Mail Vista

Windows Live Hotmail officially launched

Via Liveside.

In a press release (May 6, U.S. time), Microsoft announced

that Windows Live™ Hotmail^®, the successor to MSN^® Hotmail, is launching globally in 36 languages. The most significant upgrade for Hotmail since it pioneered the webmail industry in 1996, the new service has been built to be a vast improvement over the previous Hotmail offering, having incorporated input from more than 20 million beta testers. Windows Live Hotmail will deliver a safer, more powerful and productive e-mail experience than previous versions with flexible access via the Web, on a mobile phone or with an e-mail client.

webDotWiz just had a look at his Hotmail account but the "Beta" tag is still there (patience, webDotWiz, patience – it takes time for about 10,000 Hotmail servers to update . Oh, reading down the press release a bit further, it says the rollout begins May 7).

Remember that Windows Live Hotmail has a number of protections:

• the Safety Bar to indicate whether the messiage is from someone you know, yellow if the sender is unknown to you, or red if the email is possibly fraudulent.
• spam protection through the Mark as Unsafe link at the top of a message (click this to assign the post to the junk folder and block any further message from the same address).

Three other points from the press release:

• Windows Live Mail via web-enabled mobile phone or PDA
• Outlook Connector – a free add-on to Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 to add Live Hotmail accounts to Outlook for convenience (available later this month)
• a new desktop email client, Windows Live Mail, to replace Outlook Express on XP and Windows Mail on Vista.

Technorati tags: Windows Live Hotmail. Outlook, Windows Live Mail

Your contacts in Live Hotmail

Whether you’re using Hotmail in the classic view (because of a slow Internet connection) or the full version, you’re able to do a lot with your contacts.

You might want to have your contacts on one of your Hotmail accounts in your Outlook or Outlook Express contacts list so there’s the option in Hotmail to import and export your contact list.

The process is simple and the only bit you might wonder about is the mention of the list in CSV format – uh? what’s CSV?

CSV is shorthand for Comma Separated Values so if you export your mail as a CSV list, you’ll end up with a text file with each record looking something like this line:

Bloggs,Joe,23 Somewhere Street,Someplace,….

So don’t be put off by the jargon.

Remember, too, that you can easily put contacts into groups (handy when you want to send out party invites, for example, but please, please, use BCC so everybody doesn’t see everybody else’s email address).

Technorati tags: Windows Live Hotmail, contacts

Let Live Hotmail sort your mail

For yonks Hotmail has been able to organise your mail into folders for you. This feature is particularly handy if you receive newsletter-type mail, e.g., latest prices for plane tickets, and don’t want it cluttering up your inbox.

In classic view go to Options and in full Hotmail go to Options/More options to get to the section where you can organise mail to go into certain folders according to your own rules. Look for Automatically sort e-mail into folders under Customize Your Mail to start setting up things.

Firstly choose the button to add a new filter and the next page brings up the two steps to get Hotmail to sort your mail.

In Step 1 you’ve got a choice from the drop-down list of deciding which posts you want to filter. For example,  you might receive a newsletter each week from a certain email address. So you’d choose From address in the first text box, then contains in the second and you’d type in the email address of the newsletter sender in the third.

In Step 2, for our newsletter example, it would be best to create a separate folder into which each week’s newsetter is automatically placed when it arrives. Enter a name for a new folder, click Save and you’ve finished setting up your first filter.

Note that there’s a separate section, Junk e-mail, in Hotmail for you to deal with spam and junk email. webDotWiz recommends you set the junk mail filter to Exclusive and then all you need do is keep an eye out for the first post from someone you know whom you gave your email address to and that person is not yet on your contacts list.

Technorati tags: Windows Live Hotmail, filter, junk mail

Windows Live Hotmail latest updates

By now everybody should have, or it isn’t be far away, the latest update (milestone 10 or M10) to Live Hotmail – you’ll know when you see the name change to Windows Live Hotmail above the Hotmail toolbar on the left of the page.

It’s now easier to choose which view you want to use, either the classic view similar to the old Hotmail, or the new view of the full version in which you can place the reading pane, use drag and drop and lots of shortcut keys. There are now three places from which to choose which view you want to use: on the Today page, at the bottom of the Inbox, or from Options.

When you’re on a slow connection, e.g. dialup, you’ll want to switch to the classic view and it’s easy to switch over to the full version when you’re on a broadband connection.

For those using the classic view, the M10 update brings back the spell checker, the photo upload tool and bi-directional language support.

The Hotmail team have worked hard on comments from users and it’s worth familiarising yourself with the safety bar, i.e., the tools provided to help make us aware of emails containing possibly dangerous attachments or emails that could lead to phishing sites.

Via the Windows Live Hotmail team blog and Liveside.

Technorati tags: Windows Live Hotmail, Hotmail

Windows Live Mail desktop update

There’s a new build of Windows Live Mail desktop available which improves some of its internal workings so you won’t see much difference from the earlier version (perhaps the icons across the top toolbar have been updated ?).

You get this latest update from the Microsoft Windows Update site (updates.microsoft.com).

Click on Custom in the left navigation pane and wait while the updater checks your system. It’ll pop up and tell you that there’s an update to WLMd and you can now go ahead and let the updater download and install. The update is about 13Mb in size.

We’ll be probably seeing more Live service desktop applications updated via Microsoft Windows Update (including Windows Live Messenger).

Via Windows Live Mail desktop team space.

A final note: webDotWiz lost the shortcut to WLMd in the Start menu but Windows XP had enough sense to automatically bring up the Internet Options dialogue; he chose the Programs tab and he was able to set his default mail app to WLMd from there. You’ll see there’s a note about this on the above link to the WLMd team space.

Technorati tags: Windows Live Mail desktop, Microsoft Update

Windows Live Hotmail is the new name for Live Mail

While the million or so testers (that number includes the volunteers and webDotWizards at Rushworth Community House) have known the new Hotmail as Windows Live Mail for several months, there are all the other 239 million users who have always known Hotmail as… Hotmail.

So it’s been decided that, when the final version of the new Hotmail rolls out to everybody around the world, the formal name will be Windows Live Hotmail. Not a bad compromise really, since webDotWiz has had a Hotmail account since 1999 and would like to be able to say in another couple of years that he’s had a Hotmail account for ten years.

Via Windows Liva Mail Hotmail team blog/space, Dare, Liveside.

Technorati tags: Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Mail, Hotmail

Latest update to Windows Live Mail

Another update is being put out for Live Mail – this one mainly deals with an increase in speed for those using the Live Mail in Classic view (formerly called Light view).

To quote the team from their Space:

…we’ve also been working hard on the next version of Windows Live Mail, called M9, which focuses primarily on the Classic experience. Classic (previously known as “Light”) is for those who prefer the more familiar look and feel of Hotmail, but want the safety, ease of use, and raw speed that come with Windows Live Mail. And when I say raw speed, I mean it: it’s faster than the original Hotmail, even though it has more features!

When an account is first migrated over, it will automatically start out in the Classic experience, allowing the user to decide if and when to move up to the Full experience. Even better, moving forward, everyone can switch between the Classic and the Full experiences in the Options section anytime.

Note this bit:

Just as with M8, we’re going to release M9 over some time, so don’t be surprised if you see some new stuff while your neighbor doesn’t. After testing things out over a week or two, we’ll make M9 available to everyone.

Technorati tags: Windows Live Mail, updates