1. Safety Improvements
We're laser focused in the area of spam and safety with Windows
Live Mail and have already made major improvements over other webmail
services. Never one to rest on our laurels, we simplified and
consolidated the safety experience even more in M4.
We automatically calculate a safety level
for each mail using over eight checks. The three safety levels
are: "Known sender", "Unknown sender" or "Unsafe". You can always
click on "Why?" to find out why a mail was marked as such and what you
can do to change the safety level of this sender. How much simpler
can it be…
(Screenshots: Known sender | Known sender (after clicking Why) | Unknown sender | Unsafe)
Kahuna has already been helping identify Phishing mails to help
protect our customers -- now we make them more noticeable so you won’t
be duped into clicking on them.
(Screenshots: Real PayPal Mail | Phishing Mail pretending to be PayPal)
Oh and if you were one of those people who didn’t like having
message text shown in mails in the Junk Mail Folder,
now the default is that message content is not rendered in Junk Mail
Folder until you say you want to see it.
(Screenshots: JMF Folder)
2. Fast Search
Vroom, vroom! The new indexed search is fast and it searches
message bodies. The UI is the same as M3 but the engine underneath
is brand spanking new. We’re rolling it out slowly - not every
user will get it right away so be patient.
How you tell if you have the new search engine: If the infobar in
your search results does NOT say the following then you have the new
search engine:
"Note: At this time, the mail beta searches only the subject and addresses."
3. Spell Check as you Type
Ok this is one feature that turned out better than we
thought. Just start typing in Compose and we’ll check spelling in
the background and put red squiggles under words that are
misspelled. You can then right-click them and choose from our
suggestions, tell us to ignore that word or add the word into the
dictionary.
I know what you’re saying. Big deal, Outlook already does
that. Well, we’re the first webmail service I know that does this
on the web without installing any software!
(Screenshots: Spell Check As You Type)
4. Scrollable message and contact list.
We know you want to see more than 14 messages at a time in the message list. Well now you can see 50 messages at a time.
Why should contacts be any different? In contacts now, you can see all your contacts in one list.
(Screenshots: Scrollable message list | Scrollable contact list)
5. Configurable reading pane
Now you and I know that reading pane is the best thing to ever
happen to webmail. But for some strange reason a few people don’t
like it. Well, if you happen to be one of those people you can now
turn off the reading pane.
(Screenshots: Configuration options | reading pane turned off)
6. Resizable panes
Your folder names are long or you like the message list to be
wider? Just grab the edges of the panes and resize them to how you
like it. Your customization is maintained the next time you login
(on the same machine).
(Screenshots: resized panes)
7. Improved Error Message Discoverability
We’ve also made our error message easier to notice by moving them
closer to where your eye is, adding icons and changing their color to a
more visible color.
(Screenshots: Error message in Contacts)
8. Easier to send mail when you don’t know email address
Admit it. This is how you send mail: You find a mail
from that person. You reply to it and then delete the original
content of the mail.
Well if this is you, then Kahuna makes this easy. Find the
mail and click on the From address. We start a new mail to that
person.
(Screenshots: Clickable sender email address)
Or let’s say you were in contacts to find the email address of
some friend. Well, normally you’d copy the email address, go back
to mail, click New and then paste in the email address. Well, now
you can just drag the contact to the Mail tab and voila, we start an
email to that person.
9. Support for browsers other than IE6 & higher
Testers can access all Mail Beta functionality using Internet
Explorer version 6.0. But we know some of you like to use
other browsers. With M4 we now also support additional browsers
including Firefox, Netscape or Opera. We're still a bit of a work
in progress here, so apologies if there are still some glitches (we are
focused on making sure core email functionality is solid, but some of
the bells and whistles work better with IE6+).
10. Empty Junk Mail Folder or Deleted Items Folder with one click
Lots of users asked for the ability to empty these folders easily. Now you can right-click on them and choose Empty.
(Screenshots: Right-click menu on Junk Mail Folder)
11. Print Messages
Ok, we had this in M3 also but it was hidden in the Actions
menu. Now it’s on the main toolbar so you can easily find and
click it.
(Screenshots: Print button)
All of these are great improvements especially the Firefox support. I'm trying it out right now and so far so good.