While I agree with most of your points, I think you must credit Microsoft (and I’m certainly no fanboy - look at some of my stuff) with a good, if not great product. Inconsistent behavior can be expected fixed, but the search parameters will probably not change - if it is made too good the need for Outlook will go away, and for MS that would be bad.

the_oracle,

I agree WLM is a fantastic product. In fact, I’m using it exclusively at this point. The purpose of WLM, in my opinion, is to give desktop users a way to manage their mail, news, and subscriptions. It by no means is a full replacement for Outlook (Business Contacts Manager, full exchange integration, calendar syncing over exchange, etc) so I don’t think Microsoft is in any danger if they “beef up” WLM a little bit to make it more manageable for desktop users.

Given it’s still in Beta, it’s one heck of a product. I’m looking forward to what Microsoft does with it in the future.

Thanks for your comment.
- Adam

I have been running the most recent beta builds of WLM for about 1 year. The main reason that I use it is because of my multiple Hotmail accounts. I used to use Outlook Express but they disabled the ability to use it unless you had a premium Hotmail account. I know that there were some registry hacks to allow it but I didn’t want to bother. That was an annoying couple of months because I had to actually login to http://www.hotmail.com to check my e-mail.

Anyway, my biggest annoyance with WLM is related to message rules/filters and e-mail protocols other than POP. WLM claims that message rules can not be created for IMAP and HTTP accounts. That is a bunch of bull in my opinion. This is a huge blow for me because my school and work e-mail accounts use IMAP and they both use SpamAssassin which will at a [SPAM] tag to the subject line of a message that has be labeled as SPAM. This makes it easy to make filters/rules for messages that are labeled as SPAM. This means that I also have to have Thunderbird installed just for these two accounts. Which is decent for a free e-mail program

My other major annoyance with WLM is ClearType fonts. In build 12.0.1365, WLM added ClearType fonts which I absolutely despise in WIndows XP. To me ClearType isn’t that bad in Windows Vista.

Despite these two annoyances, WLM is a free a really good program and I look forward to the final release.

I agree with all the above points and I also think that for a beta it’s a fairly decent email client. Be that as it may I’ll add another (major) annoyance.

With all it’s new features for images/photos there is absolutely no way to insert an image into an email with it’s original dimensions intact. WLM insists on resizing it thus severely degrading the image quality. All they give you for resizing capabilities are those “handles” surrounding the image that you can push or pull around which are next to useless and do not solve the quality issue. You can store images online and attach images but you can’t insert an an original image in it’s original size into a message.

I went to the WLM forum and asked if there was actually a way to do this. The response I got was “No” and nothing more. Not very impressive.

Finally, a post about WLM vs Thunderbird (in a sense). I’ve been searching for months and months… (I don’t want to blog about my personal PoV and stuff about this topic.)

Until now, I am still not sure which one I will use. Since WLM Desktop was changed to simply WLM, there were lots of improvements and changes, and I really like it (no more advertisements for a major change).

And another major improvement, free Hotmail access, which when it was still WLM Desktop, it is not possible. So now, WLM or Thunderbird? I don’t know myself.

If Thunderbird wasn’t a FLOSS product, I would have decided quick and easily in favor of WLM, but I’m a FLOSS supporter. But on the other hand, WLM have its features not present in Thunderbird, sleek new UI and design, and so on and so forth.

Crazy world!! MS finally pulled their strings.. they can after all, compete with FLOSS head-on.

Once you have a decision, I hope you detail your criteria. Might be helpful to me as well. ^^

I’ve a terrible annoyance.
Sometimes live mail changes font of the buttons in the main toolbar and on the left column. It swhitchs to Arial i suppose, when it should be Tahoma or whatever it is.
The only way to reset it is to uninstall LM and reinstall it.
But sooner or later it changes again.
Don’t know what to do…

Unfortunately MS is pushing it because of Vista. I’ll expound on THAT piece of you know what in my own blog at a later date. It’s suposed to be the replacement for OE, and does a very poor job at it. As I use Outlook for my email application, for me WLM is used as my newsreader. My list pertains mostly to that side of it.

Rules: Parameters are limited, and cannot be defined as precisely enough to be truly useful.

Views: Same problems that pertain to the rules. I want to be able to set the views up like I want to. Not the way that MS wants me to.

Connector for Outlook: Breaks the rules I have set up.

Remove options that were useful in OE: Block sender in OE was great! Blocked that particular sender, AND killed any messages posted by that user.

The only additions that are moderately useful is the ability to bottom post(anyone that does newgroups KNOW how annoying it is to break the flow of the message by posting at the top), and the Safety Options.

Once again MS is forcing us to do things the way THEY want us to, not the way WE want to…:(

“With all it’s new features for images/photos there is absolutely no way to insert an image into an email with it’s original dimensions intact. WLM insists on resizing it thus severely degrading the image quality.”

A major annoyance I’ve just discovered. Search for a solution led me here.

The images are screen grabs of utility readings, at any departure from true size print is slightly fuzzy; not good. Yes, I can attach them, but then comments are separate to the image.

Another annoyance - I use five outgoing “accounts” identical in every respect bar “From” field (from me (real name), from wife, from both of us, from club secretary, from cpemma) and check one catch-all incoming; easy in OE, but Live Mail insists on showing them all on screen.

For all the fancy GUI and added security of the storage system, I prefer the OE way.

“there is absolutely no way to insert an image into an email with its original dimensions intact.”

I found one way - I opened the image in Irfanview (set to open original size), copied, pasted into the mail. Same trick worked C&P from Paint Shop Pro so give it a try with your favourite image viewer.

The end result was clearly sharper than my best side-by-side attempts to match sizes, so I suspect Live Mail is adding some extra compression with the “official” method.

“opened the image in Irfanview (set to open original size), copied, pasted into the mail.”

Bad news is I discover it’s pasted in as a bit-map, making a rather large size to send/receive…the annoyance remains.

About point #5, you can use ctrl+shift+f to open the traditional find dialog, there you can use all of the familiar fancy searching features. It is annoying though that you can’t seem to get rid of their “Find a message” search bar that takes up its own line.

Have hit many, MANY snags with WLM. First, it doesn’t use a separate database for each newsgroup. The result is that a single message store file is used to record what messages you have downloaded (and e-mails) and this severely slows updating and searching the one database versus the much smaller ones. Also, WLM now actually creates folders on the hard drive for the newsgroup folder and puts files under them for each message. File-based permission is easily circumvented so this degenerates the security of having a database file that could be password protected instead of using text files. WLM is much slower than OE in downloading just the headers. WLM is also much slower in exercising its rules. It takes 6 times longer to run the same rules in WLM against the same number of posts as it does in OE. I don’t have that much time to waste when there are over half a million posts that have been downloaded for a group because of a long retention (and I may want those old posts so limiting the header download to, say, 1000 messages is not wanted nor does it work since the messages are not in ascending numerical indexing order when retrieved from the server, anyway). Rules that WLM’s install imported from OE do not always work. For example, a rule in WLM to color highlight your own posts will only work if you search on your name, not on your e-mail address. So a rule that highlights your own posts using a color will work if you specify in the From clause in the rule but not if you use . If you remember to uncheck everything but “Mail” in the get.live.com site when you only want to get WLM installed, you will still have to go to Add/Remove Programs to get rid of the Windows Live Signin and Windows Live Setup programs (which run as additional processes all the time even when WLM is not running).