Windows Live Mail is Dead or Should Be.

No, I’m not talking about Windows Live Hotmail (initially and confusingly called Windows Live Mail), I’m talking about the desktop email client that was supposed to take the place of the aging Outlook Express and Vista’s default Windows Mail. I’ve used it myself and now, after no updates or word one for over 9 months as to the status of WLM or even if it’s still being actively developed, I can no longer contain myself. This has to be the worst email program I have ever had the unfortunate and frustrating opportunity to test.

Launched as a final release (version 1.0) back in November of 2007, Windows Live Mail (WLM) hit the streets as a very buggy, crash prone, feature missing, crippled version of Outlook Express 6.0 with a shiny new coat. Oh, it did have some new features after all like a decent Feeds reader, the ability to store images in the “cloud” and only include a thumbnail in your email message. You could do a bit of image editing in the process as well but all of those extra features couldn’t make up for the fact that this “Final” release was of no more higher quality and stability than a late alpha or early beta build.

Adding images for example in Outlook Express and Thunderbird email clients was as simple as inserting an image and hitting the proper alignment button as you would in any modern word processing software. A simple, straight forward task, no limitations and in my case, great for all the tutorial type emails I sent out with the usual images with circles and arrows with descriptions on each one.

Now here comes Windows Live Mail and guess what? You can’t do that any longer. Okay, you can…sort of…but the “Insert Image” button in the toolbar only applies to this new “all images in the cloud and you get everything but the original image in the message…sorry, Bub” scenario. It was kind of a mystery where the “original images” went that I sent to the clouds but they had to go somewhere. But if you wanted to do it the old fashioned way and just insert an image from your computer just like you did in old OE 6.0—forget it.

You had to go to the menu bar and eventually wind up with an “Insert image” submenu and once you managed to get through all that, the image that finally ended up inserted into your message was restricted to a maximum width and height of 400px by 400px with no options to do otherwise except for the new “handles” on the image where you could pull and stretch the image like taffy and absolutely no resizing functions to be found anywhere. Not even the ability to insert the image with it’s original dimensions intact. Unbelievable.

Other “unforgivable” things:

• No more source edit. Why? What possible reason would they have for not including this feature?
• New message counts would often not update for individual Inbox’s, Drafts and Junk folders etc.
• Switching from plain text to rich text format when writing a new message often locked up the program, forcing a restart losing your message (no auto-save apparently).
• Reports of WLM arbitrarily “deleting” all emails from every account.
• Address book when “signed in” was different from the address book when signed out (local) and adding a contact to the “signed in” address book did not update the local address book as well.
• The program often refused to shut down when closed. No, I don’t mean it went to the tray, it just disappeared when closed but remained running nonetheless until you had to kill it with the “Windows Task Manager”. And none of the so called solutions ever had any affect.
• Last but not least…lousy support all around.

So I got curious today as to what ever happened to this rather horrible piece of software. The end result comes down to this:

• Version 1.0 is still available on the Windows Live site.
• The WLM blog’s last post is still sitting at the November, ‘07 version 1.0 announcement. No reply to any of the commenter’s questions. Most comments are spam now.
• The MSDN’s WLM blog’s last post is even earlier at July, ‘07 that states they’re still working hard on the synchronization problems (the majority of the 140 or so comments to this post are spam).
• I could have sworn there used to be a Windows Live Mail category in the MSDN forums (I used to post to it) but it’s not there now.

Looks to me like Windows Live Mail is indeed dead. And not only dead but absolutely no reply to any of the comments on any of the two blogs mentioned above by any of the developers or any announcements made as to the current status of WLM. Poor show all around.

In a way it’s too bad, Outlook Express is definitely way overdue for a replacement and while the idea behind WLM was good, the actual execution was unbelievably poor in almost every aspect. It’s also too bad that it couldn’t live up to the standards of other long standing, high quality “Live” software such as “Windows Live Messenger” and the excellent “Windows Live Writer” for example. The final nail in the WLM’s coffin for me at least is that a very early beta 1 (pre-release) build of Mozilla’s Thunderbird 3.0 email client is 100% more reliable, stable and robust than WLM ever dreamed of being. Go figure.

Oh well, not every effort is a success. Maybe another and more reasonable effort will begin anew, who knows? If anyone has any information that WLM is still being developed, killed or started from scratch, please leave a comment and let us know.