What is Windows Live Mail?

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Windows Live Mail is the latest email client from Microsoft Corporation. Touted as the big brother of the popular Outlook Express and replacing Windows Mail on Vista operating system, Windows Live Mail offers the a user friendly interface with several added features.

Windows Live Mail, Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Outlook – The different email clients from Microsoft

An email client or an email program is a software application that lets you send and receive emails. If you have used online services such as Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo!Mail, you know that each time you want to check your email, you need to connect to the Internet and log in at your account.

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However, an email client, such as Windows Live Mail, is installed on your computer and stores emails on your system. Thus, you can check and go through your emails, compose new messages and replies without an active net connection. However, to download new messages and send out emails, an Internet connection is required.

Over the years, Microsoft has developed several email clients. The most famous of them all was Outlook Express because it was free and came along with the Windows operating system or Internet Explorer browser. A commercial version of Outlook Express with many added features was simply called “Outlook” and was available with the Microsoft Office package. Refer Outlook Express help for tips and solutions to problems with this email client.

The free Outlook Express was very popular with Windows users because of its simple interface and ease of use. Microsoft also provided good support for this program and it went through several upgrades and versions. However, with the launch of Vista operating system, the company stopped the developed of this much loved software – they launched a new one and gave it a new name.

I guess many thought that with Vista or Internet Explorer version 7, a newer version of Outlook Express would be brought out. But Outlook Express 7 (the previous version was 6), never saw the light of day; a new email client called “Windows Mail” came with Vista. This was once again a free software with two very useful utilities – an automated junk email filter and an easy to use search.

Download the latest – Windows Live Mail

Microsoft, however, did not leave it at that – they introduced yet another free email client and this time they call it Windows Live Mail. The program is available to all Windows users for download from the Live.com web site – Download Windows Live Mail.

So if you have been using Outlook Express or Windows Mail, you might like to install and shift to Windows Live Mail especially because its feature packed and promises to be a lot better in functionality and security that its predecessors.

Windows Live Mail features

Windows Live Mail has a nice clean interface that you can change as per requirements. You can setup multiple email accounts including Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo!Mail (you need a premium account for that). Additional features include Photo e-mail, through which you can send high resolution photographs over email as thumbnails which means the recipient’s inbox will not be congested with large attachments. The full sized photo will be displayed only when requested and that too from a private web location. Windows Live Mail has enhanced security with automated filtering of junk email including spam and phishing messages. In addition to emails, you can have RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds delivered to your inbox.

Windows Live Mail opening window - interface and layout

I think Microsoft has triumphed once again in the email client market space with the release of this great program and unless Google comes up with an email client (apart from supporting [?] Firefox and Thunderbird) and pose some kind of competition, Windows Live Mail will prove to be a winner by a very large margin.

Basics Windows Live Mail