Comment Feed for The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed (scobleizer on Channel 9)

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

rick_kirchoff — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 16:23:31 GMT

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?

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

mluschas — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 19:23:58 GMT

I was thinking the same thing when they were talking about the individual files. Why not have a SQL DB. It would seem easier. One way would be to have each user have a SqlDB associated with their windows account (even maybe created upon user creation in AD, or user account). Then there IS only one file to backup.

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

pjr593 — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 12:31:06 GMT

Hi there!

Every time I type a message in Outlook Express which includes a Euro symbol, I am asked whether I want to send the message as Unicode.

Will the Euro symbol, arguably more important than the pound and the yen, be included in Windows Mail as standard - i.e. not need Unicode?

Alternatively when will Unicode become the world standard?

Kind regards

Peter

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

phony — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 18:50:26 GMT

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:

Can the Mail Store be shared across users on the same machine like it is today in OE if the store is located elsewhere than in the user profile ?
Can the Mail Store be shared across workgroup or domain networked computers, like it can be today under O but not OE ? If yes, what kind of R/W concurrency is allowed ?
What about sharing the WAB and current multiple identities ?

Would be glad to hear about those issues.

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

davidvl — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 16:24:00 GMT

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

Re: from: "The Quit Guy" to: "lockergnome & mscott"

junior882 — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 06:48:45 GMT

ownatron wrote:

l0ckergn0me wrote:
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.

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.

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

junior882 — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 06:38:43 GMT

mscott wrote:
l0ckergn0me wrote: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.

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.

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

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

dotnet — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 12:41:08 GMT

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

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

cellis — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 20:06:01 GMT

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

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

barker — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 06:21:35 GMT

I can't believe the obvious question wasn't asked....

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.

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

DCMonkey — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 20:24:19 GMT

cellis wrote:

is there a way to use aliasing somehow to get \mail\ to be located over on D:?

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

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

cellis — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 19:09:43 GMT

question for ms devs:
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!

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

RichB — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 17:13:30 GMT

Do you use transactional NTFS to get atomic operations when writing to the .eml files and the Jet database?

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

RichB — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 17:10:56 GMT

How do I sync my contacts with my online Hotmail contacts?

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.

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

RichB — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 16:43:19 GMT

Jet Red, or Jet Blue?

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

jeffwall — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 15:17:59 GMT

Those are my wrist braces. I've found them to be a great help for my tendonitis.

They are made by Benik. http://www.benik.com/product_W_203.html

-Jeff

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

zymsys — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:17:16 GMT

I've gotta tell you I'm really impressed. I do have a question that I don't think was addressed in the interview. I own a small ISP, and both Outlook and Outlook Express cause me a great deal of grief because of their implementation of the protocols. I'd like to focus on POP3 because it is the most popular for now.

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.

from: "The Quit Guy" to: "lockergnome & mscott"

ownatron — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 17:25:47 GMT

l0ckergn0me wrote:
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.

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

lukes — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 13:52:10 GMT

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

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

AIM48 — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 06:44:14 GMT

n'other question.

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

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

AIM48 — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 06:25:23 GMT

Suggestion for the Dev Team:

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.

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

rjdohnert — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 22:18:47 GMT

Naming is everything. The one thing I dislike about the Mozilla foundation is the names are so, gay. I think Apps should have interesting and cool names. Windows Mail sounds cool, Outlook Express sounds like a cheap knock of Outlook. Whenever I hear the word "Firefox" or "Thunderbird" I think of that village people song its raining guys.

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

ZippyV — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 22:06:00 GMT

Putting the word 'Windows' in front of every application/technology name is going to confuse end-users a lot more.

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

DCMonkey — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 20:31:43 GMT

ZippyV wrote:

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 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.

Re: The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed

mscott — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 19:25:30 GMT

l0ckergn0me wrote:
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.

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.