OK. I have been playing with the Mail app again because Windows Live Mail 2012 is getting to be long in the tooth and Microsoft doesn’t seem to care whether it works or not. Mail (or WLM previously) isn’t my primary email client. I just use it for email IDs which are NOT Rogers accounts (my ISP) or my MVPS account, these being held in Outlook 2010.
So now Windows Live Mail is gone from the two computers which I use, and I will work on the other two when I have more time. It isn’t the end of an era because the Mail app is still a Microsoft ‘event’, so no tears will be shed for WLM.
Mail and its partner Calendar work very well on the Netbook. Visibility and readability are both good, especially Calendar which is no longer just a small panel on the side.. On the desktop, this is not so important as everything is eminently more readable anyway, but I did like the similar look of WLM and Outlook 2010.
Continuity has been as important to me as almost anything else. Learning new tricks gets harder all of the time, and I don’t particularly take to change immediately, hence some of my initial comments, but I do try to embrace ‘new’.
Hi Mike,
I couldn’t find many discussions or reviews online about the new Mail client found in the November build of Windows 10 Desktop. Certainly, pre-RTM discussions weren’t good. Which was bizarre, considering that email is Microsoft’s thing and has been for decades.
So, here I have just opened the Mail version in 10586.29 and added two of my accounts and a cursory glance shows that everything has sync’d correctly.
The iPad version, which I have been using for a while, still appears to be superior in clarity and overall experience (merged Inbox option, combined sent and received view, etc). I don’t know why Microsoft hasn’t made email a killer app on Windows 10 – excellent UI, stable, fast, secure and flexible. Simply make a great version of Outlook for non-enterprise use.
The Mail app could cater for both advanced and basic users (good UI enables an app to cater for both groups of users and it seems that this is something that Microsoft continues to struggle with).
Microsoft needs to do everything it can to claw back people and their inability to get to “awesome” quickly in the UI and UX competition is just hurting them even more.
Microsoft isn’t allowed to do that. If Mail became what MS Outlook is, or even close, Microsoft would be obliged to charge for it because poor old Thunderbird and other crappy mail clients would start to complain..