Steve Kafka of the Windows Live mail team has a blog post entry on their team blog entitled M5 is alive! where he talks about some of the new features. Some of my favorites include
Hotmail Classic View
OK, I know it's a contradiction to name
anything with the name “classic” as NEW. But it is. We know our customers
roam….and that they don't always log in to Windows Live Mail on computers with
IE (and many times they aren’t even
logging in from a computer at all). We want to help make sure you guys can
get your mail any time you need. Now for people not using Internet Explorer 6.0
and higher, we have a new view of WL Mail, what we're calling the Hotmail
Classic View.
...
Offline Mail and other good stuff
Announcing Windows Live
Mail Desktop Beta! The next generation of desktop mail is coming. Check out
the team blog for all the
details.
...
Configurable reading pane
Did you know that you can turn the
reading pane off? That's ok, no one else did either. Now you can configure the
reading pane while reading your mail. No hunting through options, you can
change it on the fly. Even better, we've added an option: the bottom reading
pane! Now you can chose between having the reading pane on the right, bottom,
or off. You pick. Change it whenever you
like.
...
Outlook-like shortcuts
You can now use
the shortcuts menu in the left hand navigation to switch between Mail, Contacts,
Calendar and the Today page. Need more space? Minimize the shortcuts to give
yourself the maximum amount of room to view your
mail.
...
Contact picker
I know auto-complete is
awesome. Start typing a name and we complete the address for you. It's perfect
for writing a mail to one or two people. But admit it, sometimes you just want
to browse. You want to peruse your contact list and choose your contacts and
groups. With contact picker you can browse your contacts and groups while
composing a mail and choose which addresses you want to
add.
...
Find in contacts
If your contact list is
bigger than 20 people, you're probably tired of scrolling through the list
looking for the right contact. Well, hunt no longer. Find in Contacts will
actually word wheel through your contact list as you type. For those of you
lucky enough to be on the Windows Live Messenger beta, this will probably look
familiar. Select the contact you are looking for and you'll jump right to that
contact. Your contact management just got a whole lot easier.
...
Spaces integration
Those cool contact cards aren't
just for Messenger anymore. The "contact control" now pulls in the profile
picture for your contacts. You can view their contact card, jump to their Space
or profile and more. This feature won’t be ready immediately when M5 is released
but we were too excited to keep it a secret.
...
Custom filters
While Windows Live Mail continues to use
the custom filters you set up in Hotmail, there hasn't been any way to edit the
old rules or create new one. And boy did our beta testers miss it. Until now.
Custom filters are back, allowing you to have mail sent directly to a folder of
your choosing based on the criteria you select.
This release is hot. I finally had to get a Windows Live Mail beta invite for my girlfriend. She likes it, I do too.