Omar Shahine - Windows Live Mail

The Discussion

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  Am I the only one having an awful time hearing this? I downloaded the video and turned all the sounds settings up to max, but even then I'm only getting relatively quiet audio on the right side of my headphones.
  
  EDIT: Nevermind -- low batteries were the culprit.

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     Nice.

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  I've been using Kahuna since it first went to beta, and despite the occasional hiccups, I've never regretted it. (Certainly never felt like opting out!)
  
  It's really good to see an update video - even if it is a month old! It's ironic that, as this video goes out on Channel 9, Windows Live Mail (beta) has spent the last six hours or so being a complete arse! This is after spending week with the welcome greeting telling us that they've 'hit a few bumps' with their latest build! lol!
  
  They're probably rolling-out some updates or some-such-magic as I type. In any case, I'm loving it.
  
  

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  M6 it seems is being rolled back out. Depends on which Bay you are i guess...i've got it on one live mail addy but not the other.

  It just seems to be faster and more stable. Visually more appealing and you love the search.

  Taking shape nicely.
  
  Edit: Wouldn't you just love to work on the Live mail team? Seems like a great product to work on.

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  I have been using WLM Beta since march, although there is not much mail that comes through my Hotmail address.
  
  M6 is definately better than M5, but they are soooo far off if they want to match GMail in user friendlyness, responsiveness and features. The WLM GUI just does not feel right with me for some reason.
  
  It sort of feels like (to me) that there has not been a designer on the team, just developers making things work right ... the design comes later (although that would be a strange way of doing things).
  

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  Windows Live Mail (we need a shorter name!) is good.
  
  But....
  
  My primary web mail client is Gmail (desktop is Outlook 2003). I use Gmail for instant everywhere-access, and download to Outlook.
  
  The problem is that Hotmail does not have feature parity with Gmail.
  
  There are a few key areas where Hotmail fails:

  1). POP3/IMAP access
  2). Powerful filters
  3). Related Email
  4). "Active Search"
  
  Gmail's Conversation feature is somewhat indispensbile to me. I understand that Hotmail will not have it, and that's a problem for me.
  
  Hotmail also doesn't have Google's rather useful little sidebar. Not the sponsored ads - but the "Map this Location," "Track this Package," and so on. I recently read about Active Search for WLM Desktop Client, but nothing for the web based interface.

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  In my experience of using Hotmail and Live Mail I honestly don't think there's been any improvement in terms of convenience and UI design.
  
  Even with my browser at the size of 1024x768 everything on the page seems to be squashed so much that everything has a scrollbar, even when there's only 5 emails in my inbox.
  
  I don't know why there's 5 different ways to delete an email, providing more and more ways to do one thing doesn't necessarily make it easier, it just means there's more ways to do it.
  
  I could go on, but there's no point using hotmail/live when Gmail does it better. Honestly I don't even use Gmail's interface much, I just POP it to Thunderbird along with all my other email accounts.
  
  Did I mention Live Mail is slow? Oh and there's more than two browsers in existence. While I'm at it, it's really stupid to automatically select the first email when you navigate to folders. Live Mail is a pain to use, just like Hotmail.
  

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  i only have 2 quams with Windows Live Mail:
  1. i can't select alot of messages at once and detete/move them all
  2. the junk filter isn't what it should be.

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  pringles wrote:

  1. i can't select alot of messages at once and detete/move them all
  

  
  
  ctrl+click, doesn't work for you?

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  Hey, a developer in the video. We need more of them in the videos. We need developers, developers, developers, ...

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  My complaints about Windows Live Mail are mainly that the junk filter don't seem to catch a lot of things, Outlook 2k3 filter catch most of the spam coming to my box, but hotmail let loads of it go trough.
  
  And that top AD is HORRIBLE, it takes away 25%+ screen area. At 1280x960 it seems there is so little space for my mail and the interface.
  While with Gmail I can see things clearly and at good size.
  

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  I mostly use Gmail these days, but I still check my hotmail account occasionally to see if anything important has somehow ended up there, etc.  I signed up for the Live Mail beta around January or early February and had a look at it.  At the time I thought it was much better than hotmail, but still had nothing on Gmail.  After seeing this I decided it was time I took a closer look at it again.  I think it's improved quite a lot since I frst looked at it several months ago, but it's still not enough to bring people back from Gmail yet.  These are the main problems I found in 5 minutes of use (some have already been mentioned here):
  
  When I sign in to Windows Live 'Mail' it's because I want to see my mail, so why isn't it the first thing I see?
  
  The ad at the top of the page wastes a lot more space than an ad down the right side would do, especially on wide screens like I'm using.  I'm glad there's only an ad in one place now instead of two, but they picked the wrong one to keep.
  
  Tags are better than folders, surely they should've figured that out by now?
  
  Why don't contacts appear in the word wheel if I type their nickname?  It only seems to work for full name.
  
  If I'm in Calendar and I click on Mail or Contacts, it takes me to Today instead of what I wanted.
  
  Why do I need to control+click (or shift+click) to select multiple emails?  I'd prefer to have check boxes for each email to select/deselect them (being able to do it both ways would be best).  This was mentioned in the video as well as earlier in this thread, but if something that should be just one click requires me to hold down a key as well - that's bad.
  

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  cain wrote:

  
  Why do I need to control+click (or shift+click) to select multiple emails?  I'd prefer to have check boxes for each email to select/deselect them (being able to do it both ways would be best).  This was mentioned in the video as well as earlier in this thread, but if something that should be just one click requires me to hold down a key as well - that's bad.
  

  
  
  I wondered about this complaint that I saw from several people. Ctrl- and Shift-clicking to select is a very common convention in Windows, and one that's much more flexible than the checkboxes that are used on the web. Now people have gotten used to the inferior replacement and don't want the full functionality anymore.
  
  I, for one, welcome our new ctrl-click overlords.
  

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  God I do not know how much feedback I have passed to MS over this, the bits I dislike the most is the stuff on the Today page that says just how wonderfull things are, I hate that. Also I suggested that when providing feedback on the feedback form the 1000 char limit should count down, it just should.
  
  So I'm gonna take this opportunity to air some suggestions I have like when the pink arrow appears on a mail to indicate I have replied to it, I would like a right click option to go to the mail (if present) in the sent message folder.
  
  Technology like Webmessenger should be intergrated into Hotmail now.
  
  Has anyone seen how brilliant 30boxes.com is, why does MS not have this as their own - why not just buy the company and use their template to style hotmail, oh and some of that smooth AJAX is whats needed too.
  
  Other silly things like not being able to trully organise, via drag and drop, of the box panes al la start.com
  
  Also why not allow multiple search results, as usual if I search for something it just overwrited my last result set
  
  what about sorting by attachments, I would like access to all my attachments at the click of a button
  
  I would also like to see a lot more customisation regarding the menu options, buttons like 'cancel' I can do with out, thanks.
  
  What about when composing an email and how the flashing text cursor starts right against the left hand border, thats anoying, it should be a few pixels in.
  
  And why will hotmail not remember where I set the windows sizes?
  
  Check Mail? what on earth, shouldnt this be done automatically?!
  
  Why not marry up the local mapping service with the information in a contact list, I know this is done in messenger
  
  --Anyway what has been done is the core features, like drag and drop, ajax, viewing and reading pane, spell check. Its all encouraging, I hope though that some kind of timetable for features is posted so that users can get an idea of when things are going to start rolling.
  
  Regards,
  
  Samuel, UK
  

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  Give us option to "Select all"; so that we can unselect some from "all" and move/delete the selected one; this is pretty easier when you need to keep say 2 items out of 10; instead of CTRL+Selecting 8

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  Dear Omar:
  
  I was working with the Windows Live Mail with anothe user IDfor a few days, but since last week I can not read my E-mails. 
  
  I only can see the first line (title of Windows Live Beta ... User) and the box with 4 icons below to the title. The rest of the page is blank.
  
  Could you help me? I do not know why it is. But I guess that could be that I deleted directly all temporary files of the Windows and maybe there was a key file to upload complete the beta page...
  
  With my current user I can read all my E-mails but with the old format. The failure is with my other user with the beta version.
  
  I hope you could help me.
  Thanks.
  
  Hugo Arias
  E-mail: hugo_ariast@hotmail.com
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

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  Dear friend/friends,
  
  Why would MSFT keep repeating the mistake of writing the crappiest code and design the crappiest products. Anyways, this time its with Hotmail. I have a fast DSL connection, and hotmail takes ages to open. If it opens, its half loaded. I am made to constantly refresh the screen. I think, you guys are concentrating too much on security and beauty  and other unnecessary features, thereby comprimising on speed.
  
  For sure, I am getting rid of my Hotmail account very soon for a better email service provider and there are zillions out there.
  
  Note: If your providing some service for free, build the product not for yourself, but keep the general public in mind.
  
  Thanks
  

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  In the 19th minute Omar talks about how when they release they'll talk alot about how contacts are shared between Hotmail, messenger, Spaces etc...
  
  Well, its live and I don't see ANYONE at Microsoft talking about this. Shard contacts is definately the coolest featire of hotmail (and all live services in general if you ask me). Why aren't they taking about it?
  
  -Jamie