Among the many new things you'll find when you fire up Windows Vista is Windows Mail, a replacement for Microsoft's old and mostly unloved Outlook Express mail client. Although it greatly improves on its predecessor, Windows Mail — like any OS-integrated product — sports a feature-set that is somewhat limited.
Windows Vista or XP users that want a more capable e-mail client than either Outlook Express or Windows Mail but don't want to shell out for the full version of Outlook will want to take a close look at Microsoft's Windows Live Mail, a free (though ad-supported) alternative.
Formerly known as Windows Live Mail, the new and improved Windows Live Mail 8.5 — which is still in beta — is a full-featured desktop mail client that can provide offline access to your Web-based MSN Hotmail or Windows Live Mail accounts (the latter is also in beta but will ultimately replace MSN Hotmail). But beyond that, WLM lets you manage multiple POP accounts and access RSS feeds, and it integrates with various other Windows Live services, too.
Setup
You can download a copy of WLM at ideas.live.com. Not surprisingly, you'll need to have a Windows Live ID (formerly Microsoft Passport) to install and use the software, and this requirement holds even if you don't want, have, or plan to use a Windows Live Mail or Hotmail account.
WLM can import existing e-mail messages and account settings from your Outlook, Outlook Express, or Vista's Windows Mail installation, but not from non-Microsoft mail clients like Mozilla Thunderbird (we'd be surprised if this capability wasn't added by the time the software is released).
You can add your own POP or IMAP accounts to WLM through a setup wizard similar to that of Outlook/Outlook Express. The wizards will try to automatically determine certain types of account information on your behalf like your user name and mail server addresses, but it's easy to override this feature should you prefer to fill the data manually. We had no trouble getting WLM to work with numerous POP accounts from various providers, including a Gmail account (for that you must first enable POP access through Google's control panel, however).
If you ever want to add a new account to WLM, you can do so using a convenient button right on the program's main view instead of having to delve down through menu options. Perhaps assuming that people are likely to use WLM to manage Web-based mail accounts (or owing to the beta nature of the software) new accounts are automatically set to leave a copy of all messages on the server.
Mail
WLM's user interface really shines when used with multiple e-mail accounts. Managing and navigating between several accounts is easy — each one has its own inbox and attendant subfolders, and you can move accounts up or down in the left-pane heirarchy. Each set of account folders is also color-coded to help you more easily discern them at a glance (there are seven colors to choose from).
WLM includes both spam and phishing protection, and it conveniently groups all security-related settings under a single heading called E-Mail Safety Options. This is the place to do things like configure safe and blocked sender lists for the junk mail filter and control whether graphics are automatically downloaded with incoming mail. WLM will also let you automatically block mail from any top-level domain or messages containing specified character sets, so you can say goodbye to all that .ru spam or unwanted messages in Cyrillic or Hebrew.
Text ads in WLM are displayed in the rightmost side of the program using a dim and rather unobtrusive font, and since they're generated based on the contents of your mail, the ads change along with the active message. You can easily turn off this Active Search feature, in which case the text ads turn into the same kind of graphical column-style ads you'd find on a Web page. The column ads don't change nearly as often as the text ones, but they can be more distracting since they're apt to contain videos (albeit silent ones), animations, or other elements designed to grab your attention.
