Any rumors of Windows Mail-like client for Windows 8?

[jwitalka]

By the way, I don't think the European setllement involved the mail app. It centered around the browser:
http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2009/...ft-settlement/

Jerry

[JoeP517]

The whole Windows Live suite of programs and services (and I use that term very loosely) was/is an attempt to forestall future anti-trust issues with bundling application programs in the OS. If you remember the political climate back then it seemed as though there was a new investigation or threat of one around the world almost monthly. Of course, Microsoft spun it a different way. At the time, they said that by removing the programs from the OS the development cycle could proceed independently of Windows and at a faster pace. Of course, as we have seen that is utter nonsense. On recently have we seen any significant consumer visible changes in the service side with some nice development in Hotmail and Sky Drive. The applications program side seems to be mired in the same slow pace it always was.

Joe

[kelliann1]

Larry - I have gone a month without settling on what to do for an email client since my hard drive crashed on my XP machine. I installed a new drive in the XP machine (new used one - it's an old IDE drive so can't buy a brand new one) but unfortunately that old computer from 2003 isn't going to last forever so I have to make a decision. I appreciate the note about Thunderbird. There was something else about it that I didn't care for but don't recall what. I have it installed on another computer Win7 computer and I was considering it.

I have been trying to live with WLM 2011 email client, giving it a fair shot to see if I can find a way to cope with its weird exploded menus and things they took away (I use the horizontal line feature a lot and now I can't convert it from grey to a color anymore - which used to be really helpful when I was ganging up stuff in one email and wanted clear simple separators).

I know I have to decide soon - the ISP reports my webmail box is nearly full.

[kelliann1]

WLM 2011 with its silly exploded menus and the sneaky little dropdown arrows to see more because they didn't have enough room to explode it all.... Ugh. What a lousy piece of work. If a kindergartner or a caveman designed it I could see why it looks like that.

I agree 100 percent with Dr. Who on this matter and totally appreciate his posts on it. I agree - I wish someone with good programming skills would come up with an OE clone. There are a lot of us out here who would gladly pay for it.

What forum/website can this request be made on?

I have no interest in spending time hunting through a large bunch of icons on the ribbon for something I need -- only to discover that it's on the Insert tab menu and, oh yeah, if I click that little picture of a message that says OTHER on the message tab menu, why gee whiz there's that thing I was looking for that is also on the Insert tab too.

I have been right clicking "features" to put them on the WLM Quick Access toolbar - and weirdly, sometimes I find the added features are there and sometimes not. Why? Dunno. I do like the fact that they have a quick access toolbar and it is nice that you can put all or almost all of the features on it. So far have not found a way to move the icons "up" or "down" (or in this case, sideways) to put them in the order I want.

But it is a slow, awkward clunker of a program to use in comparison with Outlook Express, lacking useful features, sticking us with multiple inboxes and a "library" sort of inbox.

My storage folders are the workhorse of my email program, and although I can move individual email accounts down below the storage folders so storage is right next to "all inbox" etc. (ake the library views), as soon as I close the program, they zoom right back to where they were before so when I reopen I have to clickclick clickety click each one again to move it down down down down down to the bottom, step by miserable step (thank you oh Great Gods of Microsoft).

I am using it with an IMAP server right now, with a temporary email address until I figure out what to do. I am keeping all of my regular incoming mail in my webmail accounts, storing it there til I decide.

I don't know if it is the imap server or not but when I go to a folder, say, sent mail, sometimes half the index doesn't show up right away. I suspect it is pulling it off the IMAP server every time I change folders, but I don't know that for sure. IMAP is so bizarre, though. You click save to save something in your drafts folder and have to wait for it to go to the IMAP server and then come back to your own drafts folder on your computer. Sometimes it is half a minute or even more before it shows up in your drafts folder. I don't know how people can "like" that. It is so weird.

Setting up WLM 2011 was easy - annoying to enter email accounts and all that jazz but no more so than setting up OE the first time, imo. However, discovering the exploded menus, the lack of an image resizer (which I now know works just like it used to in XP if you stick a small text file in with the pictures you selected), the refusal of the accounts to stay put below the storage folders, the loss of a number of features - was unpleasant, to say the least, and after several weeks of fair trial it is not something I am ever going to like even if I eventually decided to live with it or some updated version of it.

I already wanted to use the view source tab to change some pasted in HTML code to get rid of some stuff that didn't paste correctly from a web page -but of course that tab is now missing and I'm stuck with it. I also found some copy/pastes from web pages that should have duplicated exactly -- did not.

I also often can't drag the headline of a news story I want to save in a draft email into the SUBJECT line. I used to be able to always highlight the words, control, click, drag and pull it right into the subject line. Now, most of the time, it won't drop in the subject line at all - I have to do copy/paste, which is slower.

Kelliann

[bobprimak]

I presume the rant about the drop-down menus, etc. is about what Microsoft glibly calls The Ribbon -- also found in recent editions of MS Office. Either you love The Ribbon or you hate it -- I have found very few people who did not have strong preferences one way or the other. Live Apps do not have the option of returning to Menus. That is a pain in the arse, as DrWho might put it. But either we learn to deal with changes, or we must write our own Apps and post them to the Web. Not an easy task in a Web-Apps-centric world. I miss the XP Style Menus as much as anybody, but I will move forward, even into the Brave New World of Metro Apps and Live Apps, like them or not.

[kelliann1]

I presume the rant about the drop-down menus, etc. is about what Microsoft glibly calls The Ribbon -- also found in recent editions of MS Office. Either you love The Ribbon or you hate it -- I have found very few people who did not have strong preferences one way or the other. Live Apps do not have the option of returning to Menus. That is a pain in the arse, as DrWho might put it. But either we learn to deal with changes, or we must write our own Apps and post them to the Web. Not an easy task in a Web-Apps-centric world. I miss the XP Style Menus as much as anybody, but I will move forward, even into the Brave New World of Metro Apps and Live Apps, like them or not.

---------------------------
Yes it was a rant <g> and yes I hate the "ribbon." That is why, even though I bought Office 2007 for another machine, I loaded my older 2003 Office on the newest computer.

I don't understand why you say they don't have the option of returning to menus. If I can use Office 2003 with menus on Windows 7, and if people can (as Dr. Who says) get Windows Mail to work on Windows 7 by fixing what's broke (as he describes) then why can't WLM 2011. which is being used as an email client/program on my computer, not some "thing" up there on the web, have normal menus instead of these ridiculous exploded Messes. After all, WLM mail client 2009 had menus.

This is just juvenile design by MS, trying to "help" and make it look "new" by giving us cute little pictures for menus as though we can't read and need little images instead. No excuse for that.

I am not using Skydrive, not hooking my email to the web in the future. Right now, yes, am using temporary IMAP email using iCloud until I pick an email program for the computer and then it will be all POP3 - hurray - no more waiting for my own messages I just saved to a folder to go to the cloud and come back to my folder.

If I want to use a "web app" I'll use one, but leave my darned computer-based programs alone, Microsoft. <---- that's what I have to say to *them.*

I am waiting for someone to write an Outlook Express clone, a stable one that can handle gigabytes of messages if broken up into folders of say, 5,000 msgs each. I'd pay for such a thing and so would a lot of other people, I'll bet. Spent some time yesterday looking for a forum where I could make that suggestion but haven't found the right one(s) yet. If anyone can suggest a site where I can float that idea, please tell me.

Kelliann

[kelliann1]

I'm a working computer tech and have been since the DOS days.
Over the past ten years, for instance, I've had many calls about an email program that's gone Wonky and out of all those calls, all but one have been about MS Outlook. Just one of those service calls was related to OE6..

OE was still available in Vista, under the alias of Windows Mail. It could be set up to look and act exactly like OE6.

Enter Windows 7. Windows Mail was still there, but now disabled. I never did understand that, unless they new that some clever tech would find the key to re-activating it. Success sometimes comes in small packages.
Just replacing the MSOE.dll file in Windows Mail, with the same file from Vista, fixes it so it works.
I now carry that file on my Utilities DVD and I activate Windows Mail for every one of my Win-7 customers, who want it. Many have just been using Web-Mail for years and are just as happy to continue using that.
But those who have used OE6 very much appreciate being able to use Windows Mail.



Cheers mates!
The Doctor

-------------------------------------

Dr. Who -
Is Windows Mail as stable as OE 6? Can it handle many gigabytes of messages? Is the message store that you import from OE to use in Windows Mail the same size as it was in OE's .dbx files? Does WM convert .dbx files to individual emails (which I would imagine would take a *huge* amount of space).

I used to break my OE folders about every 5000 messages, more or less, and create additional folders - so I'd have Inbox and then "Inbox 1-1-11 to 6-30-11" and so on. I may be wrong but I think that increased its stability. I also, on occasion, got rid of unused folders or made sub-folders so everything wasn't at the top level.

What's your experience with the stability of Windows Mail being made to work in Windows 7. Will it handle, say, 25 -35 gigabytes of mail? Worries about stability with large quantities of mail is mainly what's been holding me back from switching to it, except for wanting to give WLM 2011 a fair trial and learn workarounds for it that might possibly make it tolerable - because I want to be at least familiar with changes that have come along since there will be new challenges built on top of those changes in the future.

Also, how does it deal with Windows 7's "contact list" - if you use WM, does it replace the "contact list" format with the familiar "address book" from OE days?

It seems to me like this Windows 7 "contact list" exists independently of the mail program - I am not too sure how it works - I think I found it can be opened independently of whether you have the WLM 2011 mail program open (not sure about that).

Kelliann

[Tinto Tech]

In reviewing this thread, I've only seen one mention of Thunderbird.

Free, simple to setup and fully licensed under GPL - no messing with copying dll's from a different operating system; it works out of the box. I use it as a sand-boxed test-bed here alongside my main Outlook client.

Incidentally, there are loads of other email clients out there, as a quick look-up on Wikipedia suggests.

P.S. @ Kelliann1: 25 to 35GB of email....Wow that's a heck of a lot of messages!

[harrodsyd]

It's highly unlikely that MS will include a mail client in WIndow 8. MS removes the mail client for legal reason, not technological ones. The EU made them remove the mail client to allow competitors to have a fair advantage in the mail client arena. Since the EU hasn't changed anything on this, you'll have to download Live Mail or Thunderbird or what ever. They're free so quitcher bitchin.

Before OE lovers turn to T'bird they should be warned that it too is a long way short of ideal: f'rinstance the simple objective of moving the big folder of stored mail from drive c: to drive f: recently gave me a sore head - seemingly because of the roundabout way T'bird looks for the place to store mail. Web-based and loosely-organised help written by generations of volunteers is the Achilles' heel of all open-source software I've tried, and T'bird's may be the worst.

[Jagworld]

MozBackup is also free and works great with TB.

[kelliann1]

There's no legal reason I can imagine that would prevent MS from creating OE as a downloadable mail program. Same way they make WLM a program you have to download. So any claims that they stopped doing OE because of legal reasons can't be worth beans because otherwise, they'd have to also stop offering WLM.

And if there is some legal gibberish that keeps them from offering it as a downloadable mail program, then, why don't they license it to someone else? Hmmm? I am sure their highly skilled lawyers could find a way to make that work. Or just outright SELL it to someone else!

IMO, of course.

Thousands, hundreds of thousands of people would pay to have that back, I think.

[JoeP517]

There's no legal reason I can imagine that would prevent MS from creating OE as a downloadable mail program. Same way they make WLM a program you have to download. So any claims that they stopped doing OE because of legal reasons can't be worth beans because otherwise, they'd have to also stop offering WLM.

And if there is some legal gibberish that keeps them from offering it as a downloadable mail program, then, why don't they license it to someone else? Hmmm? I am sure their highly skilled lawyers could find a way to make that work. Or just outright SELL it to someone else!

IMO, of course.

Thousands, hundreds of thousands of people would pay to have that back, I think.

The original reason given for releasing Windows Live was twofold - 1. they could avoid future antitrust issues with separate programs and 2. the could update the programs at a different pace than Windows. However, they did not quit making OE for legal reasons. They quit making OE because they could not easily bring OE up to current security standards. OE was/is notorious for being a terrible database manager with all kinds of issues with large datasets - your own experience notwithstanding. In short, it was easier to start from scratch to build a new email product than to upgrade OE.

As far as a Windows 8 email client goes, all I can say is "who knows?". The best thing to do is to look at the consumer preview which should be available in the next couple of weeks. Microsoft has been tight lipped about what will be in it and updates to Windows Live.

Joe

[kelliann1]

The original reason given for releasing Windows Live was twofold - 1. they could avoid future antitrust issues with separate programs and 2. the could update the programs at a different pace than Windows. However, they did not quit making OE for legal reasons. They quit making OE because they could not easily bring OE up to current security standards. OE was/is notorious for being a terrible database manager with all kinds of issues with large datasets - your own experience notwithstanding. In short, it was easier to start from scratch to build a new email product than to upgrade OE.

As far as a Windows 8 email client goes, all I can say is "who knows?". The best thing to do is to look at the consumer preview which should be available in the next couple of weeks. Microsoft has been tight lipped about what will be in it and updates to Windows Live.

Joe

Hi Joe - thanks for your view on the legal issue. I have to say, regarding large dbx files - Dr. Who reports the same experience as I do with multiple companies / individuals that are clients of his.

Perhaps all of us had the bright idea to break the large folders into several smaller ones, I don't know. But in any case, if Dr. Who will respond to my query of a couple of days ago asking about stability of WM in Windows 7, and if his answer is positive, I'm almost sure now that I need to switch to that.

I'm waiting for that consumer preview. Do you have any names/numbers at Microsoft that I can call to give them my opinion on what they are doing? Someone who counts, not a call center person.

I was just frantically trying to use the email program WLM 2011 while on deadline for a project and WLM is just impossible. The little icons on the quick access bar look alike - a pair of small envelopes - you have to hover and wait to see what they are in text and make sure you are about to click the right one. I can't believe anyone could do such incredibly poor design.

Kelliann

[bobprimak]

---------------------------
Yes it was a rant <g> and yes I hate the "ribbon." That is why, even though I bought Office 2007 for another machine, I loaded my older 2003 Office on the newest computer.

I don't understand why you say they don't have the option of returning to menus. If I can use Office 2003 with menus on Windows 7, and if people can (as Dr. Who says) get Windows Mail to work on Windows 7 by fixing what's broke (as he describes) then why can't WLM 2011. which is being used as an email client/program on my computer, not some "thing" up there on the web, have normal menus instead of these ridiculous exploded Messes. After all, WLM mail client 2009 had menus.

This is just juvenile design by MS, trying to "help" and make it look "new" by giving us cute little pictures for menus as though we can't read and need little images instead. No excuse for that.

I am not using Skydrive, not hooking my email to the web in the future. Right now, yes, am using temporary IMAP email using iCloud until I pick an email program for the computer and then it will be all POP3 - hurray - no more waiting for my own messages I just saved to a folder to go to the cloud and come back to my folder.

If I want to use a "web app" I'll use one, but leave my darned computer-based programs alone, Microsoft. <---- that's what I have to say to *them.*

I am waiting for someone to write an Outlook Express clone, a stable one that can handle gigabytes of messages if broken up into folders of say, 5,000 msgs each. I'd pay for such a thing and so would a lot of other people, I'll bet. Spent some time yesterday looking for a forum where I could make that suggestion but haven't found the right one(s) yet. If anyone can suggest a site where I can float that idea, please tell me.

Kelliann

Live Mail's interface does not entirely reside on the local machine. A lot of the Ribbon stuff is actually up in the Cloud. We have no control over Cloud-App interfaces, unfortunately. One of the drawbacks of Cloud Apps, I guess.

Cloning Outlook Express, or making an Open Source Branch, would not be easy, given Microsoft's zealous pursuit of patent and copyright issues. Even wrenching the then-moribund Eudora out of Qualcomm's cold dead hands was a really Herculanean feat. I am forever grateful to the Thunderbird folks for creating Eudora OSE, which I now use. Qualcomm was so impressed by the surge of Eudora OSE use that they revived their own Eudora, now in Version 8 last I read. Too bad no such Open Source clone is likely for OE, for the reasons I have stated here.

[BruceR]

Live Mail's interface does not entirely reside on the local machine. A lot of the Ribbon stuff is actually up in the Cloud. We have no control over Cloud-App interfaces, unfortunately. One of the drawbacks of Cloud Apps, I guess.

That seems most unlikely when I can use Windows Live Mail offline, whilst disconnected from the internet, for all functions including full use of the ribbon.

Bruce