What's new in Windows Live Mail Beta2

Many of you must have already tried the Windows Live Suite released earlier this month, of which Windows Live Mail Beta2 was a part of it. With this Beta release, you can now choose from a list of Windows Live applications and install them all at once or you can choose whichever you want to install using Unified Installer about which I had posted earlier here.

Taking into consideration many of the suggestions given by beta testers, a new build has been released. I being one of the beta tester, and as part of beta tester community, feel very happy that many of our suggestions are considered and put into this build.

If you look at the build, its Windows Live Mail Beta Version 2008 (Build 12.0.1365)

After installing, the first thing I did was, went to the Outbox and cleared the stuck messages. Many were facing the issue of stuck messages in the earlier beta. Since I am one of Windows Live Mail beta tester, I knew this issue was fixed in this build. And the stuck messages were cleared easily. So this is one of the bug fixed and one will not come across this problem in future.

Toolbar Customisation:

Now there’s an option to Customise Toolbar, you can decide which buttons you want on the toolbar. Click on ‘Show Menu’ and there you have ‘Customize toolbar…’ option. Or if you have ‘Show All Menus’ ticked, then from View > Customize toolbar…. And it’ll open up a window, where you can choose which buttons you want to add or remove on toolbar.

or from

You'll get this window to choose the buttons

Updates to Contacts:

More options provided for importing and exporting contacts.

Same options can also be obtained from clicking on ‘Show menu’ dropdown.

Continuing with the Contacts, now a List view has been added to Contacts, making it more convenient to view long lists. This list view behaves in a similar way like all other list views of Windows, you can click on the column name to sort by that item. You can also right click on the column name to add and remove columns. And there’s a preview pane also to view details of each contact without having to open a separate window.

You can get these options from ‘View’ dropdown.

Quick Views:

Quick Views allows you to view mail from all your different accounts in one location. Options like ‘All Drafts’ and ‘All Junk E-mail’ have been added. So the Quick Views can be used as aggregate of all your mail accounts.

Layout Option:

Now you can choose how your Windows Live Mail Layout should look. You can arrange according to various options provided.

The blue highlighted area is the section which will be modified.

Changes to Photo e-mail:

There have been some more features added to Photo email, options when you want to send photos with mails.

More Border options, which will add borders to photos, with color palette to change the color of Borders.

And here also a ‘Layout’ option is provided, which will give you different ways the images will appear with messages.

And when you receive email with images, there’s an option where you have option to save all images in single click and there’s an option to view image as slide show.

Change in sign-account:

Change in sign-in ID can be done by the given option.

Other changes:

-> Also the way newsgroups show up in your Folder pane is changed. The newsgroup name is shown at end now, making it convenient to adjust the pane to get more space.

->Added local folders to the Newsgroup view, to manage these accounts easily.

->Now you can hear Sound, when the new mail arrives.

->As said earlier message stuck in Outbox bug has been fixed along with few other bugs.

So these are the changes done in the Window Live Mail Beta 2. So if you haven’t yet started using it, give it a try. You’ll surely like it. Remember its still in beta , and if you find anything to be added or improve upon , you can send the feedback.