Click on image for a full sized version.
I saw a hack on Digg, that allowed you to get into the Windows Live Mail BETA preview and actually use it. So I tried it and it worked. I won’t cover my theories of whether this ‘hole’ was intentional or accidental in this post though. Screenshots at the bottom.
As you can see from the image above the new Mail is quite clean and sleek. However those huge ads really take up a lot of space and I find quite annoying. You have to use Internet Explorer, you can view it in Firefox but a lot of the functionality isn’t there.
The preview pane (can be seen above) can only be set to be shown on the left side, not up or down. This is annoying as if I looked at the emails I would have to scroll left and right to get the full view. I would rather scroll up and down.
The Calendar and Contacts are no big deal, they are OK but feel like they need more functionality and a better feel to it. For example you can’t import contacts from anywhere only create new ones. It also doesn’t give me that AJAX-ish feel that Gmail has. The Today is a place for Microsoft to put up their new announcements about Mail.
Overall: It is definitely a major improvement over Hotmail, but still needs a lot of work and has to have Firefox support. I like the new sleek and clean design, it is definitely easier to use than that rancid Hotmail *shudder*. The ads have to go, or only keep one, for god sake you are advertising the same thing for your own products. We’re not blind!
Contacts Today Calendar
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