Windows Live Mail beta

And another Windows Live beta account for me..
This time, the new version of Hotmail: Windows Live Mail

Windows Live Mail is an advanced web based email. It's got all the features you'd expect from a normal webmail plus a bunch of nice advanced features.

The advanced features currently work only with Internet Explorer 6 or higher, but you get a new fancy looking "old-school" webmail for browsers like Opera. The interface is quite streamlined again, it's good looking but not intrusive. Simplistic, I might say.

The new interface in IE 6
The new interface in Opera 8

The new functionality is something you could find in a Windows email client, like Outlook. Windows Live Mail is actually quite similar to Microsoft Outlook 2003.

You have your mail folders on the left, mails in the middle and the currently opened mail on the right. You can also just drag and drop mails to other folders, just like you'd drag and drop files in Windows Explorer. Selecting multiple messages also works in a similar fashion as selecting multiple files in explorer (shift+click)

Everything works pretty quickly, as the page is done using AJAX techniques, so the browser won't need to reload the page for example if you click on another mail.


Quite nice work, just needs support for other browsers than IE.