I upgraded yesterday to the new betas from Windows Live, including the latest version of Windows Live Mail. There were the usual batch of bug fixes, performance tweaks and UI changes, but one little addition caught my eye this morning:

When you select the "Junk E-mail" folder (usually to check for false-positives or just to empty the folder), you no longer get a "preview pane". That means that you don't have to read spam just to delete it.

Since a lot of spam relies on you actually seeing the message (with embedded images etc), I thought this was a really nice touch. Now you have to deliberately open spam email before you see the contents, and you can delete it unread.

If you're interested in checking out the new Live betas, you can install a whole bunch of 'em in one hit (you get to choose which ones, of course) from here. Take a look!