Interface irony...

[robmueller]

i noticed some interesting interface design choices with the Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta and I've posted the thoughts here:

http://blog.fastmail.fm/?p=584

Since comments in the blog are off due to spam, feel free to discuss here.

Rob

[steffens]

I downloaded Windows Live Mail Desktop (what a horrible name compared to something as simple as Outlook Express) a month or so ago. I liked it, except for one significant problem: You had to completely close out and sign out of the program before it would purge your deleted messages when using an imap server like Fastmail. Outlook Express will purge your deleted messages everytime you switch to view a different folder, or there's a convenient button that will allow you to purge messages.

[robmueller]

The good and bad I've experienced of Windows Live Mail Beta so far:

Good
* Delete = Move to Trash ability, yay!

Mixed
* New 2 line layout of all emails with the sender on one line on the left, date on the right and subject on a line underneath.

  Joe blogs                                                  3/12/2006
  Subject of email

Bad
* The way the splash screen just sits there for 5 seconds saying "Logging into Windows Live server" or something like that, do it in the background, don't block me from getting on with things
* CPU usage problems. Not sure what's going on, but when you start it up, it seems to spend minutes using 100% of CPU but not really telling you why
* Activity feedback is bad. When an email is downloading, OE shows a progress bar showing how much it has downloaded, WLMD doesn't. When you delete a message, it just sits there for a second or two, not telling you anywhere what it's doing.
* Since there's now 2 rows for each email, there's no columns, so you can't customise. I like to see the size of each email in a column, I can't do that anymore
* The spam filter seems a bit dangerous. It took two legitimate emails from folders without telling me and put them into the Junk Mail folder
* There's a lot of messages in all the folders in the different accounts I have setup, but I'd hope the search indexes them. If it does, it must be badly, because using the search box is horribly slow. Minutes to get a result

Hmmm, suprisingly more bad than I realised there. I guess that's why I'm still using Outlook Express...

Rob

[lane]

Originally posted by robmueller
* Since there's now 2 rows for each email, there's no columns, so you can't customise. I like to see the size of each email in a column, I can't do that anymore
* The spam filter seems a bit dangerous. It took two legitimate emails from folders without telling me and put them into the Junk Mail folder

Rob,

You can put the reading pane at the bottom in order to get one-line display and the extra columns. I like to add size, sent date, and sometimes "sent to". View > Reading Pane > Bottom. Right click on an existing column header, and choose "Columns...".

I prefer to turn off WLMd's junk mail handling and reply on Fastmail's. Actions > Junk Email > Email safety options...

-- Lane

[robmueller]

I already have View > Reading Pane > Bottom set. Assuming there's a way to change back to the Outlook Express view of one row per message (and I presume there is because of what you say, and also because under the View menu there's a "Change columns..." option that's currently greyed out), it's certainly not obvious to me. I've gone through all the menus and the Options dialog tabs.

Rob

[lane]

Originally posted by robmueller
I already have View > Reading Pane > Bottom set. Assuming there's a way to change back to the Outlook Express view of one row per message (and I presume there is because of what you say, and also because under the View menu there's a "Change columns..." option that's currently greyed out), it's certainly not obvious to me. I've gone through all the menus and the Options dialog tabs.

Rob

I'm not sure we are using the same version, perhaps. Mine is 8.0.1172 (from Help, About...). In mine, you can do View > Message List > Always use single line view. Then View > Change columns... will not be greyed out.

I'm still not sure I like this thing. But when you say "send in Arial" it actually writes the html for Arial, unlike OE, which for me does not specify the font because my default IE font is Arial (I think). I'll have to look also at some of your other issues.

[Mystakill]

Rob,

If it's remotely related to regular Outlook, you should be able to right-click on the column headers, select "Custom", then click the "Fields" button. You should then be able to add/remove columns as well as set the number of rows to display.

FWIW, Vista also allows one to enable checkboxes in Explorer for those who either can't manage or don't want to shift-click, ctrl-click, or ctrl-shift-click.

[robmueller]

I know about right-clicking on the header column, but it doesn't give me the option of customising the columns, just what I want to sort by.

I think it must be a version issue, I see there is a new beta version now, I'll download and try that.

Rob