Windows Live Mail Beta - Issues

  • Thread starter Thread starter Nicholas Hanson
  • Start date Start date
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Nicholas Hanson

Here is a list of issues I have with the latest beta. I'm hoping I just
missed an option on at least some of these and someone will chime in and
tell me how to resolve it. Otherwise I hope the dev team takes note. Now, in
no particular order:

Lack of customizable toolbar. This seems to be a trend with MS lately. You
can't customize IE7 hardly at all, you can't customize the toolbar of Live
Writer, and you can't customize Windows Live Mail. This trend STINKS.
Specifically I'd like to remove the text labels to the side of the icons and
it would be nice to be able to rearrange the items to taste. I also set it
to show all emails in plain text... but in some cases it would be nice to be
able to say I'd like to see a specific message in HTML. This can be done now
via Alt+Shift+H or by navigating the menu it would be far better if I could
just add an icon to the toolbar for it... that's just one example

Lack of 64bit version. I have 64bit Vista Ultimate and the Microsoft Mail
that comes with it is a 64bit app. If windows live mail is supposed to
replace that it would be nice if there as a 64bit version. The whole live
series of apps seems to lack support for 64bit, for supposedly bleeding edge
apps it's pretty sad MS isn't supporting the full capabilities of it's own
OS. Not that it's necessary, but it would be nice.

Threading? I'm not sure if that's what the issue is but when I subscribe to
a bunch of newsgroups and I go through the list to load the initial posts
(after I disable the 300 at a time limit) if I click on the next group while
the first group is still downloading posts the first group stops and the
second group starts loading. In this age of multi-core processors it would
be nice if the app would spawn a thread to grab all the posts and would
happily continue to download them as I move on to the next group. (it would
also be nice if I could just tell the app to get all the posts from all the
subscribed groups in one command instead of moving from group to group one
at a time and performance in downloading headers and doing a "catch up" is
HORRIBLE).

Lack of Vista integration. Vista has a very nice calendar and contact app
included in the OS. It would be REALLY nice if Live could sync with them on
systems where they are present. The Calendar option was instead removed
entirely in this beta and there seems to be no easy way to set up automatic
updates between my Live contacts and Vista Contacts (again, please inform me
if I'm missing something here.) I haven't tried the feeds yet but I hope at
the very least Live Mail and IE 7 share the same feed engine (or at least
can be set up to automatically sync between them.)

That's what I've come up with so far... with about an hour of use on Vista.
 
Nicholas Hanson said:
Here is a list of issues I have with the latest beta. I'm hoping I just
missed an option on at least some of these and someone will chime in and
tell me how to resolve it. Otherwise I hope the dev team takes note. Now,
in no particular order:

Lack of customizable toolbar. This seems to be a trend with MS lately. You
can't customize IE7 hardly at all, you can't customize the toolbar of Live
Writer, and you can't customize Windows Live Mail. This trend STINKS.
Specifically I'd like to remove the text labels to the side of the icons
and it would be nice to be able to rearrange the items to taste. I also
set it to show all emails in plain text... but in some cases it would be
nice to be able to say I'd like to see a specific message in HTML. This
can be done now via Alt+Shift+H or by navigating the menu it would be far
better if I could just add an icon to the toolbar for it... that's just
one example

Lack of 64bit version. I have 64bit Vista Ultimate and the Microsoft Mail
that comes with it is a 64bit app. If windows live mail is supposed to
replace that it would be nice if there as a 64bit version. The whole live
series of apps seems to lack support for 64bit, for supposedly bleeding
edge apps it's pretty sad MS isn't supporting the full capabilities of
it's own OS. Not that it's necessary, but it would be nice.

Threading? I'm not sure if that's what the issue is but when I subscribe
to a bunch of newsgroups and I go through the list to load the initial
posts (after I disable the 300 at a time limit) if I click on the next
group while the first group is still downloading posts the first group
stops and the second group starts loading. In this age of multi-core
processors it would be nice if the app would spawn a thread to grab all
the posts and would happily continue to download them as I move on to the
next group. (it would also be nice if I could just tell the app to get all
the posts from all the subscribed groups in one command instead of moving
from group to group one at a time and performance in downloading headers
and doing a "catch up" is HORRIBLE).

Lack of Vista integration. Vista has a very nice calendar and contact app
included in the OS. It would be REALLY nice if Live could sync with them
on systems where they are present. The Calendar option was instead removed
entirely in this beta and there seems to be no easy way to set up
automatic updates between my Live contacts and Vista Contacts (again,
please inform me if I'm missing something here.) I haven't tried the feeds
yet but I hope at the very least Live Mail and IE 7 share the same feed
engine (or at least can be set up to automatically sync between them.)

That's what I've come up with so far... with about an hour of use on
Vista.
Click to expand...

Good observations, I agree with just about all of them. As for 64 bit, lets
hope we can see an excellent 32 bit version first! ;-)

In terms of getting all the posts from subscribed groups try: Alt ->
Tools -> Synchronize All
 
Nicholas Hanson said:
Here is a list of issues I have with the latest beta. I'm hoping I just
missed an option on at least some of these and someone will chime in and
tell me how to resolve it. Otherwise I hope the dev team takes note. Now,
in no particular order:

Lack of customizable toolbar. This seems to be a trend with MS lately. You
can't customize IE7 hardly at all, you can't customize the toolbar of Live
Writer, and you can't customize Windows Live Mail. This trend STINKS.
Specifically I'd like to remove the text labels to the side of the icons
and it would be nice to be able to rearrange the items to taste. I also
set it to show all emails in plain text... but in some cases it would be
nice to be able to say I'd like to see a specific message in HTML. This
can be done now via Alt+Shift+H or by navigating the menu it would be far
better if I could just add an icon to the toolbar for it... that's just
one example

Lack of 64bit version. I have 64bit Vista Ultimate and the Microsoft Mail
that comes with it is a 64bit app. If windows live mail is supposed to
replace that it would be nice if there as a 64bit version. The whole live
series of apps seems to lack support for 64bit, for supposedly bleeding
edge apps it's pretty sad MS isn't supporting the full capabilities of
it's own OS. Not that it's necessary, but it would be nice.

Threading? I'm not sure if that's what the issue is but when I subscribe
to a bunch of newsgroups and I go through the list to load the initial
posts (after I disable the 300 at a time limit) if I click on the next
group while the first group is still downloading posts the first group
stops and the second group starts loading. In this age of multi-core
processors it would be nice if the app would spawn a thread to grab all
the posts and would happily continue to download them as I move on to the
next group. (it would also be nice if I could just tell the app to get all
the posts from all the subscribed groups in one command instead of moving
from group to group one at a time and performance in downloading headers
and doing a "catch up" is HORRIBLE).

Lack of Vista integration. Vista has a very nice calendar and contact app
included in the OS. It would be REALLY nice if Live could sync with them
on systems where they are present. The Calendar option was instead removed
entirely in this beta and there seems to be no easy way to set up
automatic updates between my Live contacts and Vista Contacts (again,
please inform me if I'm missing something here.) I haven't tried the feeds
yet but I hope at the very least Live Mail and IE 7 share the same feed
engine (or at least can be set up to automatically sync between them.)

That's what I've come up with so far... with about an hour of use on
Vista.
Click to expand...


You're spot on about the toolbars...I can't understand the reasoning in MS
taking away the *** choice *** for users in having buttons of their choice
on the toolbars & i've not seen any reason given by MS for this huge
backward step.

MS, if you are reading this, why are you doing this?
 
Alright I've had some time to play with Feeds now. The good news is they DO
seem to sync with IE7. The bad news is that I find them all but useless. The
main problem is that there seems to be no support for categories. This is a
showstopper for me and even IE lets you filter by categories on the right
side of the display in the browser. This is a real killer with feeds like
the one at www.hokiesports.com (official website for VA Tech sports) where
they have one feed for ALL sports and the Category indicates what sport it
is.

Search Folders are also pretty much useless without categories. I was hoping
I'd be able to set up search folders that filter by category (such as one
for each sport on the hokiesports feed) or even aggregate feeds so I could
for example make a search folder that included both the football posts from
hokiesports as well as the Fox news feed for VT Football. None of this is
possible.

Less important but still annoying is I'm used to in other client's folders
aggregating the feeds they contain. So if I set up a "Sports" folder and put
5 sports feeds in it then clicking directly on the Sports folder would
display all (unread by default) posts in the 5 sports feed the folder
contains (with an option to display ALL of them). An option to "flag" posts
would also be nice in this case making it so that they too would show in
these aggregate views even when marked as read.

Relating back to my original post another button that it sure would be nice
to have on the customizable toolbar is "next unread"... again it's possible
by drilling through the menu or using a keyboard shortcut but it sure would
be nice to have the option to put it on the toolbar.

UI weirdness - Contacts and Messenger are NOT peers to Mail, Feeds, and
Newsgroups. Contacts and Messenger (as well as Calendar if it makes it back)
link to external windows so they are peers with each other but having
nothing to do with the display above those bars. It's not a HUGE deal but
they should be removed and put somewhere else (toolbar?) Also when minimized
to the tray in Vista the tray icon for Live Mail looks exactly like the
Quick Launch Icon. Since in Vista the tray is not sunken and you can move
the quick launch bar beside the tray it's potentially confusing for someone
who doesn't know better as to which one launches the app and which one is
the tray icon. Not really a big deal but I have to think this violates some
kind of UI principle. Also it would be nice if instead of those bars you
could get the single row of icons like on the web based version and in
outlook.
 
I'm aware it runs on 64bit OS's, if it didn't run at all I wouldn't have
been able to write the post about it in the first place. My point was that
it would be nice, though I noted "not necessary" to have a 64bit binary.
I'm sorry if I didn't state that clearly. I'm simply disappointed in the
fact that MS doesn't seem to be releasing very many 64bit native apps. I
was under the impression that it was basically just a recompile with no code
changes necessary and if that's the case you'd think they'd throw out 64bit
versions for those of us on 64bit OS's. Again though this is an EXTREMELY
MINOR point but I just thought I'd mention it.

I'm curious though, why would an email program require admin rights to run?
That sounds like an incredibly stupid thing to do considering email
attachments and the preview pain are fairly common virus/spyware attack
vectors (probably second only to the browser).

its actually 32/64bit compatible, if it wasn't, you would need to
runas>admin to even start it.
 
Known issue. MS has acknowledged it, and all but promised that it
will be fixed in the next public build.

Gary VanderMolen
 
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