The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed
- Posted: Sep 16, 2005 at 2:35 PM
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As part of our journey around Windows Vista teams, we wondered what was being done to Outlook Express. Well, for Windows Vista it's been renamed to Windows Mail. And that's not all.
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Any more information about them?
http://www.xi-soft.com/default.htm
stop posting tanalizing vids without links
[C]
I like that the dbx files are being replaced with individual RFC standard .eml files.
The enhancements for MS newsgroups sound cool.
Oooh, .contact files !!!
Are you going to do a video with the Windows Calendar team?
Ian.
I didn't go in much detail in the video. I will be going into much more detail in my blog.
http://spaces.msn.com/members/bryanstarbuck/
Showing the Microsoft support newsgroups = priceless
That's going to help so many people, and totally flood the groups and hopefully one day, kill off that annoying web front end.
Thanks guys!
Don't have more than one person in the room at once again. I have no idea what the quiet guy in the corner (with the sunglasses hanging off his collar) was doing there - other than throwing the conversation off track. Just when we were gonna look at more of WHAT CHANGED IN WINDOWS MAIL, someone interrupted the process.
You really need a part II of this one, Robert.
But the name isn't the only thing. MSIMN was implemented a shell namespace extension. Hearing about how your emails are stored as normal files in the file system, with full metadata -- it's like a blast from the past.
With the OE folder structure in the file system, there isn't much of a need for a separate Mail app -- it could be just a different shell view. I can understand this being infeasible for the Vista timeframe, but as a long term goal it would be great.
Because now my Outlook Express got corrupt because my Inbox.dbx grew over 2GB in size...
That's the reason I had to switch over to Outlook --- BTW, is there a limit there?? My PST-file is already well over 10GB in size!!
Ok, I have a question for the Windows Mail team:
I understand that every mail message will now be an .eml file on your harddrive. Well, I have folders with over 200,000 messages in it, so that will mean that there will be folders on my system with more than 200,000 files in it! Wouldn't that be very bad for performance and how long will it take to open such a folder in windows explorer?!
Outlook 2003 has about a 30 gig limit.
Previous versions had a 2 gig limit that was absolutely strict. Can't speak for Outlook XP as I didn't like it from the beginning. It may have been the version that got it past 2 gig but can't say for sure.
Look on Slipstick.com for a link to the Outlook backup addon, it's worth having.
I appears to me that Everything is being setup so that it can be easily imported onto a winFS store at a later date. With .eml, .contact and .nws as the file backed store with a schematized store.
Or more basically the Jet store currently readily available. and in wide use in current windows. (on the server side. Active directory, Exchange, client side, Outlook I believe is or was on jet store) Will be phased out and moved to a sql based storage engine that is more integrated at the FS level. WinFS.
Would that be a fair assesment or is it too early for that to be talked about.
Basically to me Jet is being used as a place holder for some of the common store concepts with file backed systems until WinFS can be delivered.
I havn't heard the full story on how RSS is being stored in the common stoarage platform but I imagine it will have the same story. and then be easily movable to the WinFS platform.
The reason I ask, is that one of the dev's pm's ?? on the search team asks or questions if WinFS is needed at this point. And states that most of the items shown in the WinFS video is achievable in the current vista platform.
I personally believe that it is, and that is because WinFS extends the current db idea with composable ojects. The best way to look at that is that the System can start to understand the domain it is in.
A contact for example can be a client. and based on the system understanding what a client is. can be modified to prevent simple mistakes. as breaking attorny client privaledge etc.
Relationships is another thing that WinFS brings in that is very strong. with that I wonder what new paradyme that will be introduced into the UI to handle that in the future.
All in All, most everything that I have hoped for has started to show up in the client. now just add RSS aggregation that reads from the common store and you have it made.
Douglas
It's funny and nice to see that they used ADS!
I used the exact same strategy when developing a webmail application.
However, I sometimes wonder now whether it wouldn't have been a better idea to store everything in a SQL 2005 database, as you can do fast full-text searches easily that way, and won't have the problem of tens or hundreds of thousands of files sitting in a single file system folder...
On the first test machine I used (which was well below what they recommended, it was slow as cold molasses.
On a 3 GHz, 1 gig RAM machine, I managed to get up to 176,000+ messages (over 2 .5 gig) and it wasn't that bad but still it was slow. As the mentioned in the video, performance is still being worked on. A lot of indexing going on.
Comparing the 117,000 messages in the current OE to the new format, I don't know how you can put 200,000 messages in OE as it is now and not be slower.
I can tell you that the messages I used for this test were put into an OE dbx file first then extracted with one of Steve Cochran's tools (I forget whethere I used DBXpress or OEX) and then burned that to a CD and did a drag and drop into Vista's build of OE.
This has been the only testing I have done in the newer Vista build of OE. Copying, deleting, moving messages and little of anything else. Bryan can tell you I have been rather vocal in the past about the stability of the message stores in OE. I am not the only one either. As to Community features, Word wheel or Contacts (which has been a pet peeve of mine as well), I have looked at those very little. Stability of the message stores has been a high priority with me.
That's WinFS for you. Remember that WinFS is built on SQL Server functionality.
Ian.
- Steve
Each email folder is a different file system folder. The file system folder would only have 200,000 .eml files if all of those messages were in one folder. We don't expect users to navigate to the store folder, unless they want to backup or restore their mail database.
Users will primarily use the mail UI or the shell search UI. The shell search UI does expect to have to scale to a large number of files.
-Bryan
There's two separate Jet database engines: Jet Blue (aka Extensible Storage Engine - ESE) and Jet Red (Access). They are completely separate. The one they're talking about here is Jet Blue.
More info from http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/ese/ese/portal.asp:
"The Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) was formerly known as JET Blue, and so frequently the term "JET Blue" or "JET" is used interchangeably with ESE. However, there are in fact two completely separate implementations of the Joint Engine Technology (JET) API, called JET Blue and JET Red. The term "JET" is frequently also used to refer to JET Red, which is the database engine under Microsoft Office Access. The two JET implementations are completely different, are separately maintained, have a vastly different feature set, and are not interchangeable."
I appreciate MS taking the time to make Windows Mail as good or maybe a little better than Thunderbird, but I can't help but feel like there's a better way to write an e-mail client than having it be the next iteration of the GUI version of UNIX mail.
Maybe my expectations are too out there, but my version of "shock and awe" is probably different than other people's?
http://www.msvistablog.net/
To whoever is shooting the clips, cud u pliz step away a lil and not be too much in the faces of the person being interviewed.
Also, cud u keep the camera focused more on wat is being demonstrated and not the person's face. We really don't need to see whoever is talking every 2 seconds. Switching the camera back and forth all the time is really annoying
Otherwise, we appreciate wat u r doing. Gud job!
Channel 9 is all about not using professional equipment. I use the microphone on the camera, so gotta stay close and intimate.
My style is to shoot where the action is. If the interviewee is talking to me, I'll aim my camera there. If he or she is demonstrating something on screen, I'll shoot there. Again, that style is mostly for best audio, but also just because I try to aim the camera where the action is. Can't make everyone happy.
On-topic: Yet another stupid Windows [blabla] name. I'm SICK of it! Just keep the name Outlook Express, NO reason to change the name. Use the 'Windows' word for the operating system, nothing else. The idiot that came up with this idea needs to get fired.
I like the adhoc style
That's what channel 9 is all about.
Agreed. The 'quiet guy' really made this video a chore to watch. The questions seemed forced and did not bring anything to demo, except a longer download.
I also hope that you can have a cordless mic for at least the main demo'er. You will still get the adhoc production feel, its just that we can hear the content better without having closeups.
Other than those gripes, good job Robert.
I disagree. As I said before this name change will help alleviate the confusion between Outlook and Outlook Express that I've experienced first hand from end users as well as in newsgroups and support forums.
It's a mail program. It's the one that comes with Windows. "Windows Mail" makes sense.
You should probably store a hash (at leat MD5) when the message comes in so that you can indicate if the message soource was manually changed (by a person - or by a program) on the file system.
Right now you have everything stored in a directory - is this heirartical
As in a sub directory for friends another for buss contacts - or perhaps .contact files anwwhere on the disk , seems to me it should be doable by implemting a virtual folder for .contacts
Will Outlook be storing contacts etc in the same way as Windows Mail?
It would be great if I could switch between the two applications without having to manually import contacts/emails
Don't have more than one person in the room at once again. I have no idea what the quiet guy in the corner (with the sunglasses hanging off his collar) was doing there - other than throwing the conversation off track. Just when we were gonna look at more of WHAT CHANGED IN WINDOWS MAIL, someone interrupted the process.
You really need a part II of this one, Robert.
This is the Technical Evangelist (TE) sitting in the corner that you didn't like
I was at the interview because before I became a TE I was a developer on the team that develops Windows Mail (and this was only a couple of months ago). My focus as a TE is the Windows Vista platform API's and the questions I asked generally revolved around how Windows Mail used the platform API's. Soon many developers will be using these new API's (some are already) and I thought that they may be interested in how a large product like Windows Mail used the new API's in Vista.
I am disappointed that you felt that I led the discussion off track, but please try to keep in mind that many niners visit this site to see how a product implements features and what API's it uses. I did not intend to use Channel9 as a showcase for new products as Microsoft has other venues for that. I wanted niners to see how the new technology is implemented and the people & process that goes into making our new technology.
In the end I want Channel9 content to be accessible to all niners and will keep your criticism in mind for any future content I am part of.
The POP3 protocol tags each message with a unique identifier (given with the UIDL command). Outlook and Outlook Express both seem to ignore these UID's and if a transfer fails part way through will re-download the same message again and again. Users complain to me that my server sent them 300 copies (for example) of the same message, when what really happened was that Outlook downloaded the same message 300 times, each time thinking it was new. Using UIDL would avoid this problem so easily.
My second biggest pain from OE/Outlook is their interpretation of the CRLF/CRLF delimiter between the message header and message body. The STD's say that a CRLF/CRLF pair is the delimiter between the header and body, but they do not mandate that the CRLF/CRLF pair must exist. Both Microsoft MUA's require this double octet pair and will crash if they don't find them. This is the biggest problem which causes the first problem I described. Lotus Domino does not include this delimiter if a user sends a message with a subject but no body. While I think both products are flawed in this regard, I'd like to see both fixed as loose interpretations of the STD's result in better software for all of us. These two bugs are the biggest things I'd like to see improved in both OE and Outlook.
I don't have an MSDN membership, so I can't test to see if you've already corrected these things, but I wanted to bring them up just in case. Thanks very much for taking the time to listen.
They are made by Benik. http://www.benik.com/product_W_203.html
-Jeff
BTW - you should try using a Bluetooth/GPRS phone connection, especially if your call is being handed off between multiple base stations (eg if you're in a car or train). Don't be so naive as to assume it's the same as using an old-style 56K modem.
you guys said that \mail\ will live under \documents and settings\, as a long time user of windows i have to say i have become scared of \documents and settings\ based trees because when windows goes bad, usually the C: drive has to be rebuilt. this means that you loose your \documents and settings\. so the question is: will there be a way to locate \mail\ onto the D: drive so when windows goes bad, and has to be replaced, i dont have to worry about loosing it when C: is rebuilt.
is there a way to use aliasing somehow to get \mail\ to be located over on D:?
as a general rule i need the ability in vista and in xp to get the features of a limited user account under \documents and settings\ yet locate all that user data onto another drive letter. is this possible or going to be?
thanks,
cellis
ps: if this isnt going to be possible please let me plead for this feature!
I don't know about Windows Mail, but in the current version of OE there is an option to move the store folder at Tools->Options->Maintenance->Store Folder
Will the new Windows Mail also be an RSS reader? Given that there are so many potentially similar UI elements whether reading email, Usenet News, or RSS feeds, it seems like an obvious thing to do.
Also I think you need to be prepared to take some heat for the "special" functionality that will only available on Microsoft newgroups (the ability to rate responses, show special icons etc.) There are a LOT of people that are going to say "there they go again" with yet another "proprietary" feature.
good point, yes i see in OE and O how to move the data store location. the problem with this, at least as i understand it, is there are additional security features applied to \documents and settings\ based locations which means when i move the location of the O/OE file store i will loose these security features.
what i want is all the security features inherent in \documents and settings\ yet i want to relocate that tree for the user's data onto some drive letter other than C: given when windows goes bad the C: drive mostly will have to be wiped and remade. then i want the ability to knit back together that user's \documents and settings\ data tree into their "new" account on the machine.
lets make it easier to get the user back to their data after windows goes bad and the C: drive has to be rebuilt.
thanks,
cellis
I am not an MVP but quite active in the german dotnet-newsgroups. I am one of the people mentioned in the video who "lives" in OE.
There are some things in OE that have to be fixed but were not mentioned in the video or throughout the discussion here:
Please make sure that copy/paste from Visual Studio to Microsoft Mail (MM) won't break the text-only-format of MM. In OE you have always to reformat your code. In total I have spent days or weeks reformatting my code for the newsgroups. Doing the workaround by pasting the code to Word and then to OE doesn't really solve the problem.
Please make also sure that we don't need something like OE-Quotefix in the future.
http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/oe-quotefix/
Microsoft Mail should quote in the correct way by default - at least for the newsgroups.
We have discussed the video in the german csharp-newsgroup. Feedback on the gold/silver/bronze-status-thing and the possibility to rate posts is generally good. We wondered if it would be possible to add a "sticky post" with a link to a FAQ-list for newbies so that we don't have to answer the same things again and again and can concentrate on the nitty-gritty. We also wondered if it would be possible to do a search in a newsgroup-archive like http://groups.google.com/
One possibility would be to integrate Google-Groups - even better would be a newsgroups-archive done by Microsoft at least for their own groups.
A lot of MVPs and regulars - many of them working very hard every day for free to support the users of Microsoft-products - would be glad to see that Microsoft would build at least a newsgroup-archive-search for their own news-server because Google-Groups simply don't work after they have been relaunched.
Cheers
Arne Janning
Gotta agree. I'd much rather have pure Devs in the room. Nothing against the sunglasses guy, but he seemed to interject to make sure the devs in the room knew that he knew what he was talking about. As a dev, it seemed kind of clear that they didn't really accept him.
I don't mean to overly harp on this, but for me as a dev, I get a little bit creeped out when a "marketing" or evangelist guy tries to step in to explain the product I've been building the last year. These devs are more than able to explain the stuff they've clearly done the work on and having this person on the room was clearly uncomfortable for them to some degree. Then, again, Robert, I know you've got corporate politics to work through to secure these interviews. And on second thought, it was VERY entertaining to see the natural interaction going on:D
ownatron,
No offense, but I have to agree that every time there seemed to be a flow in the interview, your interjections didn't seem to keep the interview in flow. That's not a personal attack, just an observation from someone who's watched most of the 9 videos. I'm sure it was a strange scenario for you to evangelize a product for a team you were on just a few months ago, but in a different role now.
Anyway, I'm sure you'll do well in your new position. Best of luck, in all sincerity.
Dear Windows Mail team,
I have a suggestion for Windows Mail. It's importance is not very high though, but I thought it was nice to share with you.
In some situations, I have to attach to a message a file which I will never use after that. The file may be deleted then.
Currently I have to do this myself, but perhaps Windows Mail can do this for me when I can specify this in the Open File dialog.
This will become handy in a lot of situations, and also applies to Outlook and IE when I send attachments.
Hope this helps.
Keep up the good work.
Kind regards,
David van Leerdam
Applause for going back to mail content storage in standard RFC compliant .eml files. Nice to hear also about WAB XMLization and Account Storage out off the Registry. Understanding the need for transactional JET engine DB for performance and/or presentation uniformity.
Still some sharing related questions bother me for which I did not find answers in the forum:
Would be glad to hear about those issues.
Kind regards
When outlook express was used, I liked to go into the dbx files from time to time and delete/clear the junk out of my inbox, outbox, sent, and deleted folders to ensure my system stayed healthy.
I have found on Windows Mail that searching for the hidden files are not as easy as they were for outlook express. Normally, I search for *.dbx and included the hidden files/folders.
I tried to do a search for *.eml in windows mail and my search came up with nothing the first time. Then, I searched for .eml the 2nd time and got nothing again but noticed in the name portion of the search frame that the search was searching for name:.eml which was not correct. So, I searched for .eml again and although I found the hidden files of Windows Mail, I was not happy that all the files were shown all bunched up instead of in their perspective folders. Why would Microsoft make this so different?
I do like the junk mail option...it performs rather well. But I don't like the fact that I can no longer view my contacts down the left lower side of the windows mail client like I did previously in outlook express. I've tried to get them to show up but according to Microsoft, they'll remain hidden until needed. What moron thought of this, I wonder?
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