Windows Mail - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Windows Mail is an email and newsgroup

News client

A newsreader is an application program that reads articles on Usenet . Newsreaders act as clients which connect to a news server, via the Network News Transfer Protocol , to download articles and post new articles...

client included in Windows Vista

Windows Vista

Windows Vista is an operating system released in several variations developed by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, and media center PCs...

, that was superseded by Windows Live Mail

Windows Live Mail

Windows Live Mail is a free of charge email client from Microsoft's Windows Live set of products. It is intended to be a successor for Outlook Express on Windows XP and Windows Mail on Windows Vista...

. It is the successor to Outlook Express

Outlook Express

Outlook Express is an email and news client that is included with Internet Explorer versions 4.0 through 6.0. As such, it is also bundled with several versions of Microsoft Windows, from Windows 98 to Windows Server 2003, and is available for Windows 3.x, Windows NT 3.51, Windows 95 and Mac OS 9...

. Microsoft previewed Windows Mail on Channel 9 on October 10, 2005.

Unlike Outlook Express, Windows Mail is not considered to be a component of Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...

. As such, it was not made available for earlier Windows operating systems, while Windows Internet Explorer 7 was made available for Windows XP.
Windows Mail has been succeeded by Windows Live Mail, which was built by the same development team as Windows Mail and also serves as the replacement for Outlook Express for Windows XP

Windows XP

Windows XP is an operating system produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops and media centers. First released to computer manufacturers on August 24, 2001, it is the second most popular version of Windows, based on installed user base...

. Windows Mail replaced Outlook Express, which came with previous Windows versions.

New features

Although the Windows Mail interface has only minor differences from Outlook Express such as the toolbar icons being replaced to reflect Windows Vista

Windows Vista

's interface and some interface features incorporated from Outlook 2003

Microsoft Outlook

Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager from Microsoft, available both as a separate application as well as a part of the Microsoft Office suite...

including the right-hand "reading pane", larger changes have been made hidden from the user.

Windows Mail uses IPv6
IPv6
Internet Protocol version 6 is a version of the Internet Protocol . It is designed to succeed the Internet Protocol version 4...

if the domain name for the servers resolves to IPv6.
Mail messages are now stored in individual files instead of in a single database file. A transactional index database based on the Extensible Storage Engine
Extensible Storage Engine
Extensible Storage Engine , also known as JET Blue, is an Indexed Sequential Access Method data storage technology from Microsoft. ESE is notably a core of Microsoft Exchange Server and Active Directory. Its purpose is to allow applications to store and retrieve data via indexed and sequential...

enables real-time searching and improves the stability and the reliability of the stored data. In case of corruption, the indices can be rebuilt from the mail files.
Account setup information is no longer stored in the registry. It is instead stored alongside the mail itself, making it possible to copy an entire Windows Mail configuration and mail store to another machine in a single step.
Features like Bayesian
Bayesian spam filtering
Bayesian spam filtering is a statistical technique of e-mail filtering. It makes use of a naive Bayes classifier to identify spam e-mail.Bayesian classifiers work by correlating the use of tokens , with spam and non spam e-mails and then using Bayesian inference to calculate a probability that an...

junk-mail
Spam (electronic)
Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately...

filtering and top-level domain and encoding blocking have been added.
A phishing
Phishing
Phishing is a way of attempting to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT...

filter has been incorporated as well, protecting users from web sites that have been identified as being malicious.
Additionally, Microsoft Help Groups has been added, which is a preconfigured link to Microsoft's newsgroups. Some additional functionality has been layered on top of the standard newsgroup functionality to have individual threads be marked as a "question" or an "answered question". Postings may be rated as well.
With the release of Windows Vista, Windows Mail has a documented COM-based API. Previously, the Outlook Express object model was undocumented, except for Simple MAPI messaging functionality.

Removed features

Unlike its predecessor Outlook Express

Outlook Express

, Windows Mail does not have WebDAV

WebDAV

Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning is a set of methods based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol that facilitates collaboration between users in editing and managing documents and files stored on World Wide Web servers...

, making it incapable of accessing web-based email services through WebDAV. Although Outlook Express integrates with Windows Messenger

Windows Messenger

Windows Messenger is a client by Microsoft that is included in the Windows XP operating system. Designed for use by corporate users as well as home users, it was originally created as a streamlined and integrated version of MSN Messenger...

, Windows Mail has no such integration as Windows Messenger is no longer included. A more full-featured free downloadable application, Windows Live Mail

Windows Live Mail

integrates with Windows Live Contacts

Windows Live Contacts

Windows Live Contacts is part of Microsoft's Windows Live services. It integrates tightly with Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Profile to provide users access to their contact's profiles and information...

.

Unlike Outlook Express, Windows Mail does not allow users to switch Identities or manage multiple identities within one running instance of the program. Instead, identities are now tied to the user account and to create additional users or identities, a new user account has to be created.

Also, HTTP clients are no longer supported in Windows Mail.

The ability to use the spellchecking dictionaries of MS Office (when installed) has been removed. Windows Mail only supports the following languages:

English (US only)
French
German
Spanish (International Sort)

External links

Windows Vista Official Site
Channel 9 (Microsoft) - 'The new Outlook Express: Windows Mail demoed'
Windows Vista for Beginners - 'How to migrate from Outlook Express to Windows Mail'
Windows Mail Forum - 'Discussion forum for Windows Mail Applications'
Computerworld article - 'Microsoft gives Vista's 'Windows Mail' the heave-ho'
How to Reinstate Windows Mail in Windows 7

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

New features

Removed features

See also

External links