Windows Live Mail is a combined email, calendar, and contacts
program that replaces three products that were available previously with
Windows Vista: Windows Mail, Windows Calendar, and Windows Contacts. If
you haven’t purchased Microsoft Office Outlook, you can use Windows Live
Mail to send and receive email. For connecting to email servers and
receiving email, Windows Live Mail supports Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) and Internet Message Access Protocol 4 (IMAP4). For sending
email, Windows Live Mail supports Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). Windows Live Mail also
supports Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for use with Web-based
email services, such as Windows Live Hotmail.1. Getting to Know Windows Live Mail
Windows Live Mail is one of several free desktop programs
available as part of the Windows Live Essentials. You do not need to
sign up for Windows Live to use these programs, but most of them include
enhanced functionality available to Windows Live users (such as
uploading photos and synchronizing contacts online).
To install Windows Live Essentials, click Start→All
Programs→Accessories→Getting Started. Use the option titled Go Online to
get Windows Live Essentials to download and run the Windows Live Setup
program. When Setup starts, select the programs you want to install and
then click Install. That’s it! Once you install the Windows Live
programs, they are available by clicking Start→All Programs→Windows Live
and then selecting the program that you want to run.
You start Windows Live Mail by clicking Start→All Programs→Windows
Live→Windows Live Mail. As Figure 1 shows, Windows Live Mail
has an interface similar to earlier versions of Outlook Express. From
the deceptively similar interface, you might think that Windows Live
Mail is essentially Outlook Express with a face-lift. The truth is,
however, that Windows Live Mail is dramatically different.
You can configure Windows Live Mail to send and receive email for
multiple accounts. When you do, you’ll have a separate inbox and working
areas for each account.
If you browse your personal folders, you’ll find the folders
Windows Live Mail uses under %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail.
In the main folder, Windows Live Mail stores messaging data in the
Message Store database and you’ll have one top-level folder for each
mailbox you’ve configured as well as additional folders for your
calendar data, your outbox, and more.
NOTE
AppData and all the folders
and files it contains are stored on your computer as hidden folders
and files.
In the mailbox folders, Windows Live Mail stores email messages as separate Email
Message (.eml) files. The .eml file format is a raw email message file
format that includes the routing information for the message. These
folders also include the following subfolders:
- Inbox
Stores individual .eml
files for email you’ve received from other people
- Sent Items
Stores individual .eml
files for email you’ve sent to other people
- Deleted Items
Stores your deleted email messages as individual .eml files until you empty the
Deleted Items folder
- Drafts
Stores individual .eml
files for messages you’ve drafted but have not sent
- Junk Email
Stores junk email you’ve received as individual
.eml files
The Message Store database (Mail.MSMessageStore) tracks the folder
location and the email items within individual folders. Windows Live
Mail uses the database to help manage your email.
Because of how the database and .eml files work, at a very basic level
Windows Live Mail is really just an organizer and viewer for your email.
Whether you are working with the Search Results window or the individual
Windows Live Mail folder, you can:
Open an email by double-clicking it.
Forward an email to someone else by right-clicking it and
selecting Forward.
Reply to an email by right-clicking it and selecting Reply to
Sender or Reply All as appropriate.
In the left pane of Windows Live Mail, you’ll find a familiar
folder structure, starting with a Quick Views node for quickly accessing
unread email from any email account. Under the node for each configured
mailbox, you’ll have subnodes for Inbox, Sent Items, Deleted Items,
Drafts, and Junk Email. There’s also an Outbox, which stores outgoing
messages for all mailboxes (the messages will appear in the appropriate
Sent Items folder once they have been sent).
In Windows Live Mail, you can search your email by selecting the
starting folder and typing your search text into the Search box
provided. If you select the top-level folder for a particular account,
you can search all of the email folders associated with that account at
once.
Even more exciting is that you can search your email and read
email returned in search results without ever having to open Windows
Live Mail. You can do so by following these steps:
Click Start and then click your logon name to access your
personal folder in Windows Explorer.
In Windows Explorer, type kind:=email in the Search box and then
type the text you want to search for within your email. In the
search results, you’ll see a list of emails that match your search
text by the sender’s email address and message subject.
When you click an email that you want to view, you’ll see the
complete text of the email in the Preview pane.
NOTE
If the Preview pane is not displayed, click the Show Preview
pane toolbar button. Tthe Windows Search
service automatically indexes email folders used with Office Outlook
and Windows Live Mail. This means you also can use this technique with
Office Outlook.
Windows Live Mail periodically synchronizes your messaging,
calendar, and contacts data between the program running on your computer
and the online service. Keep the following in mind:
With Windows Live Hotmail or any IMAP account,
synchronization ensures your Inbox, Drafts, Sent Items, Junk E-Mail,
and Deleted Items folders have the same contents whether you are
using the desktop program or logged in to the online service. With
POP3 mail servers, synchronization retrieves email from the inbox
and by default leaves the email on the server. By leaving the mail
on the POP3 server, you can check mail on one computer and
still download it to your home or office computer later. However,
this also means that you need to delete and file mail in more than
one place. With Windows Live Hotmail and IMAP, you’ll see the same
folder view no matter which computer or device you’re using to read
email.
With Windows Live Contacts, synchronization ensures
your basic contact data is the same whether you are using the
desktop program or logged in to the online service. Basic contact
data includes your personal profile, personal contacts you’ve
created and contact categories you’ve defined, but does not include
people networks available when you are accessing the online
service.
With Windows Live Calendar, synchronization ensures
your basic calendar data is the same whether you are using the
desktop program or logged in to the online service. Basic calendar
data includes personal calendars you’ve created and events you’ve
added to personal calendars as well as group calendars for Windows
Live Groups you’ve created or joined and shared calendars to which
you’ve subscribed online, but does not include the calendar agenda
items or calendar to-do lists that are available when you are
accessing the online service.
The Windows Live Mail team has also devised a much easier way for
you to back up your email. The previous Outlook Express clients did not
make it very easy to back up and restore your email repository. With
Windows Live Mail, backing up and restoring your email is easy. You
really need to back up only one folder, and that’s the %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail
folder.
2. Setting Up Windows Live Mail and Configuring Email
Accounts
When you first start using Windows Live Mail, the Add An
Email Account Wizard will guide you through the process of configuring
your first email account. Using this wizard, you can set up your default
email account by completing the following steps:
Type the email address and password for the account you are
configuring (see Figure 2). To
successfully send and receive email, you must use the email address
the email server expects—either the email address you’ve been
assigned or the one you selected to use when initially setting up
your email account.
In the Display Name text box, enter the display name for the
email account and then click Next. The display name is the name that
will appear in the From field when you send email to other
people.
If you are configuring email for Hotmail, Yahoo, or another online service, Windows Live Mail
will automatically configure itself for the service and then attempt
to connect to the service to download your mailbox and related
folders. In some cases, you may be required to change settings in
order to use Windows Live Mail with the service. If Windows Live
Mail successfully connects to the service, you’re done and don’t
need to follow the remaining steps. If Windows Live Mail can’t
connect to the service, ensure you’ve entered the correct email
address and password, or perform a required procedure, such as
upgrading to Yahoo Plus or enabling IMAP with Google Gmail.
If you’re configuring a connect to mail servers in your
organization or other mail servers Windows Live Mail doesn’t
recognize, you’ll need to manually configure mail. As shown in Figure 3, select the
incoming email server type from one of POP3, IMAP4, or HTTP.
If you selected HTTP, you must enter the fully qualified domain name
for the incoming mail server.
If you selected POP3 or IMAP4, you must do the following:
In the “Incoming server” text box, type the fully
qualified domain name of the incoming email server, such as
mail.microsoft.com. The incoming email
server is the POP3 or IMAP4 server from which you receive
email.
In the “Outgoing server” text box, type the fully
qualified domain name of the outgoing email server, such as
smtp.microsoft.com. The outgoing email
server is the SMTP server to which you submit email that you
want to send to other people. Just about every email server in
the world uses SMTP for submitting messages.
Select a logon authentication mechanism. If you are
unsure, select Clear Text Authentication. If the incoming,
outgoing or both servers requires a secure connection, select
the related checkbox to enable SSL.
Confirm that the port information is correct. Windows Live
Mail sets the port for the incoming and outgoing servers based
on the options you select. With POP3 for the incoming server,
the default unsecure port is 110 and the default secure port is
995. With IMAP4 for the incoming server, the default unsecure
port is 143 and the default secure port is 993. With SMTP for
the outgoing server, the default port is 25 (whether you are
using a secure or unsecure connection). If you get connection
errors using port 25, try 587.
If the mail server requires a user name and password when
a user sends email in addition to when a user retrieves email,
select the “My outgoing server requires authentication”
checkbox.
NOTE
Most email servers require a user name and password
for both sending and receiving mail. If a password isn’t required
for sending mail, the mail server may be vulnerable to
exploitation.
Confirm that the login id is correct. The login id is usually
the same as the email user name. For some email servers, however,
you might need to enter the name of the domain in the form
domain\email_alias, such
as northamerica\williams (note the backslash). In some cases, you
might need to type this information in the form
domain/email_alias, such
as northamerica/Williams (note the forward slash).
Click Next, and then click Finish to complete the
configuration.
You can set up additional email accounts by following these
steps:
In Windows Live Mail, click the “Add email account” link that
appears at the bottom of your list of mailboxes.
Follow the previous procedure to complete the account
configuration.
Once you configure your email accounts, you’ll be able to send and
receive email using the configured accounts. As necessary, you can
modify the settings of an email account by following these steps:
In Windows Live Mail, right-click the top-level node for your
account, and then click Properties.
As necessary, change the email account settings, including the
user information, server information, and type of connection.
Click OK to save your settings.
