Over the past few days I've been playing with the latest beta of Windows Live Mail Desktop. WLMd is essentially the successor to Outlook Express, in that it's a small email and usenet client. In addition to mail and news, however, WLMd also handles your RSS feeds, and presents them to you in a "mail-like" fashion.

For many years at home now I've been using Mozilla Thunderbird as my mail and news client. It's pretty slick, and I would have no trouble recommending it to a friend or to a friend's mum and dad. However, I saw no harm in checking out Microsoft's latest offering.

My thoughts so far, then. The good:

  • The "active search" feature is very nice. Simply start typing and your current view is filtered down according to the text you've typed. This is very handy if you're searching for something you caught in a blog post a while back, but is now buried deep within your feeds.
  • Making use of this search functionality are the "search folders", which are like views on your data. An example is the "unread mail" folder, which shows all of your unread mail from across all the accounts you've set up. That's quite cool.
  • Integration with the other Live products is pretty tight. If the person you just received an email from is in your instant messaging address book, you can reply instantly with Windows Live Messenger. If you'd like to publish an email message or feed article to your blog, you can pop it open in Windows Live Writer. Very nice.

The bad:

  • The 'reading pane' (or preview pane, if you like) can be either to the right of or below your message list, but you can't customize that on a per-folder basis. I would love to have the preview pane to the right of my email inbox but beneath my RSS feed list, but that's not possible.
  • There's a skyscraper ad taking up about 80 pixels of real estate at the right side of the window. Considering Microsoft are pushing the "horizontal" layout (folders | messages | reading pane), this takes up a lot of valuable space and makes the window feel very cramped.

The rest:

  • The keyboard shortcuts are hard to get used to. This isn't really a slight on the product, but I'm so used to being able to hit "n" in Thunderbird to get to the next unread message that hitting "Ctrl+U" feels really cumbersome.
  • Junk (spam) mail handling is very good, except there's no way to mark a messages as junk from within a search folder. Since you're likely to spend most of your time in the "unread mail" folder, that makes it very awkward to flag a spam message. You have to switch back to the relevant inbox, locate the message, and then hit the Junk button (or press Ctrl+J).
  • RSS feeds with Simple List Extensions (SLE) don't seem to work at all.
  • Program options are difficult to find (the main menu is tucked away under a menu button similar to Windows Media Player). I wanted to modify how often the program checks for new mail (the default is 30 minutes), and had to hunt around for that menu button, then click Tools, then Options. I know that Microsoft seem to be shying away from the old "main menu" style, but the common options should be a little more accessible.
  • I still don't know how this program fits in with/competes with Windows Mail - the mail client that ships as part of Windows Vista.
  • Perhaps the biggest obstacle to getting mums and dads into this program: It requires a Windows Live ID (ie Passport or Hotmail address) to run. You can add any old email account you like once you're in, but to get in you need to sign in using your Live ID. I assume that this has something to do with presence awareness and synchronizing of your address book, but it seems unnecessary.

I'll continue using WLMd as my default email program at home for the rest of the week, and see whether it's worth switching over permanently. I'm also evaluating it on behalf of my own parents, who will (finally) be online in a week or two. We'll see whether it beats out Thunderbird in the race to the folks' desktop.