The time has finally come to unveil the Beta of Windows Live Mail to the world!

Since I’m sure many of you are visiting this site to find out where you can download it…I won’t make you wait any longer for that info.  Click here to get the latest build! 

Here are the build specifics…  Build #: 12.0.1184.0517 (just refer to it as build 1184); Languages available:  English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese

What’s New?

Just a few weeks ago we made the announcement about Windows Live Mail – and now we finally have the opportunity to let you all dive in and try it out! As I mentioned in the last blog post, WL Mail offers features from Windows Mail, Outlook Express and WLMd, and even includes some new ones. Later in this post you’ll see a quick sampling of just some of the new features that we’ve added.

I’m sure you’ll first notice that WL Mail beta has a lot of similarities to WLMd, but we’ve made quite a few changes since then that I’m sure you are going to notice right off the bat.  I don’t want to spend too much time going into the specifics of each feature (that will come in blog posts down the road…), but I do want to take a little time to go into a few details on some of the Setup and Sign-in changes that we’ve made since those will be the first things you will likely notice.

Setup

We made some updates to the overall setup experience for Windows Live Mail.  This is way different than the setup experience of our products in the past – and it’s new for all the Windows Live clients.  In fact, you should also give some of these other products a try – you’ll see a very similar setup experience for WL Messenger and WL Writer which are also releasing Betas today…congrats to those teams as well!

Here are a few other quick comments about what you might notice during and after setup:

• It’s much faster than it was in the past. Hooray for performance! J
• Shortcuts for Windows Mail and OE will be replaced by WL Mail shortcuts. NOTE – Windows Mail and OE bits will remain on your computer and if you uninstall WL Mail, the old shortcuts will return.
• New Windows Live location in the Start Menu. After you install, you’ll see that there is a new location under All Programs for all the Windows Live clients that you have installed.

Sign-In

Now that you’ve got yourself set up, you’ll notice that we go straight into the sign-in process for WL Mail. 

There are a number of changes that we made to the sign-in experience to try to make this smoother and easier to get you started in Windows Live Mail.

1. Auto-configuration of your accounts. We now recognize a number of different account types and will attempt to auto-configure yours so you don’t have to remember what your incoming and outgoing server information is.
2. Windows Live ID (formerly known as Passport…) signin not required. You can simply use WL Mail with your POP or IMAP email accounts. We do, however, recommend signing in with a Windows Live ID when using WL Mail to get the most out of the product as some features (like Photo E-mail and Contacts sync) work best when you are signed in.
3. Migration of your old accounts. If you’re using a WL ID, we’ll migrate that account over automatically – this is not new. But, now we will also check to see what accounts you’ve used on Windows Mail or Outlook Express as well. If you’ve used any accounts on those apps in the past, we will also attempt to automatically migrate them over as well.

Because of all the changes we’ve made in the Sign-In/Setup experience, we really want to hear what you think about it! If you just want to send us your thoughts – please go here. If you need help with something because you ran into a problem – might be best to try to reach out to the community through the newsgroup.

Now you’re in!

Hopefully this screenshot is enough to entice you to go and install our Beta right away! Like I said earlier, I’m not going to go into too many of the new feature updates in this blog post as those will come to the team blog shortly, but here are some new visual updates that we’ve made to the product.

1) Sleek new frame – The frame of the window is much slimmer and has a sleek new design. Also, if you’re using Vista – we are now Aero-enabled!
2) Improved shortcut buttons – The shortcut buttons now run along the bottom of the folder pane for easier navigation. We think our Outlook users will probably be familiar with this feature.
3) Compact View for folders – From here, you can collapse all your folders for a more streamlined experience, and pick and choose which ones you would like to have accessible when using this view by clicking on the “+” button.
4) No more visual advertisements - You will still see the pane for Active Search on the right hand side of the product, but these can also be turned on/off through the View menu.

Updates to the compose page

1) Stationery button in the toolbar! Now you can easily access all your stationery options directly from the compose toolbar…
2) Improved Spell-checking. With WL Mail, we offer a few built-in spellers depending on which languages you installed. We provide English, French, Spanish, German and Korean at this time (with plans to add more for future releases). Also, we will now support any spellers that you may have downloaded previously!
3) Summary tab for contact info. When choosing a contact to send mail to, now you can easily get to their contact info by double clicking on them – and the real benefit of this is the summary tab which gives you easy access to the data you have about this contact. (This is also available through the contacts view)

Send us feedback!

If you aren’t new to the Beta program, many of these options won’t be different from what you’ve seen in the past… If you are new, however, here’s the quick and dirty guide to how to get feedback to the product team. (I’ll be doing another blog post shortly to walk through each of these in more detail…)

Newsgroup: This is where you should go if you want to discuss something that you’re seeing in the product with other beta testers and the product team. It’s great for talking about a feature or trying to see if someone else is also experiencing the same problems you are.

Feedback: This is where you should go when you just want to send us your thoughts about the product as a whole, or about specific features (good/bad, I like this feature/I hate this feature, I’d like to see this in the feature/I wish you’d take this out of the feature, etc…). The product team won’t be able to respond to you through this channel, so be aware of that.

Support: If you’re experiencing an issue that is blocking you from using the product and you need an immediate resolution (i.e. you can’t sign in, you’re getting sync errors, etc…), you should contact our support team for help. If it’s not critical and it’s just a bug in the Beta product, then the newsgroup is probably the better place to go for this.

And there you have it!

We are super-excited about this Beta release and can’t wait to hear what you think about it as well! Please send us feedback using the above links on what you like and don’t like…

–tanja