Woo-hoo, finally! After 2 betas and months spent focusing on all your feedback and reported bugs, figuring out thorny legal issues, going through triple checks with the Secure Windows Initiative (SWI) guys and basically burnishing and polishing the product; We’re excited and proud to announce the release of Windows Live Mail. The final bits can be downloaded here. Just click the download button and the rest is gravity.

Since we launched Beta 2 in September, we’ve focused on performance, stability and your most important bugs. We knew that first and foremost, you wanted a fast, great email program to connect to your hotmail, gmail and other personal accounts; not to mention that email server you’re running in your basement at home. We’re really proud of our core email and contacts experience and want to thank you for helping us make the tradeoffs that will make you love the application. Additionally, most of you already know all the OTHER juicy things we do, but for the uninitiated; we have also thrown in a huge improvements for sending and viewing photos via email, added RSS support, improved our newsgroup support for the port 119 jockeys, integration with Windows Live Messenger (view presence, start an IM from WLM, etc), Windows Live Writer (start a blog post from an email) and Windows Live Photo Gallery (view attached pictures in gallery). The list of features and improvements goes on for quite bit. You can find a description here. Our previous blog posts also go into some detail, subscribe to the feed and dig in to find out more.

About 2 years ago, as a company, we decided that we needed to rationalize the different investments we had in the email space. We had servers (hotmail, Exchange), we had multiple email clients (Windows Mail, MSN Explorer, Outlook, Hotmail etc) and a ton of stuff in between. Out of some of that thinking came the future of consumer client email per Microsoft: Windows Live Mail. I remember moving from the Windows team and moving into my Windows Live digs and wondering what the heck we were going to build. After a few months of kicking prototypes around we decided that we would codename the project – and came up with ‘Elroy’, the preteen character from the Jetsons – we were officially building email for the future. We haven’t called it that in a long time, but that has still been our focus and it’s been quite a journey with really incredible twists and turns. One of my favorite dumb ideas was when we decided to ship an orange email client – we were going to shock the world with our quirky boldness. Fortunately for us (and for you) we ultimately decided against it.

Ok, let’s quickly do some book keeping:

Language support: Windows Live Mail is available in 59 markets and 35 languages; the full complement. Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian (Bokmal), Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian – Latin, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian

Upgrading the beta: We recommend that you do an uninstall of beta 2 before you install the final version (no worries, your email and data will be preserved). We appreciate your willingness to rock the beta and while it’s been pretty solid, it’s still possible you may experience some strange behavior during upgrade – we optimize the best experience for final installs of our software. Of course upgrades are supported and our support reps are standing by to help on the off chance you run into any issues.

Feedback: Blog comments are great and you can also go to our feedback website here.

We want say a big “Thank You!!” for hanging in there with us. You cheered us on, gave us a hard time and more importantly, used the product. We could not have done this release without you – you complete us :). We hope you love the application and pass it on to your friends and family. And if you don’t, let us know why. We’re always listening and you know version 2 is coming. ‘Smatteroffact we’re already hard at work planning the next set of features. We really want to solve some of the next generation email needs and do more to achieve our vision of software + services; our goal is to make your online life smooth like butter. If you have some insight on what you’d like to see, drop us a line. Remember, there are no guarantees, except that we’re listening. Hard. Stay tuned as we ramp up on delivering the next version of Windows Live Mail.

The product team members who have been working tirelessly on the Product for the last 1+ year have thought hard about their favorite features in Windows Live Mail. Here are some of our own best-loved things about the product:

“Mmm, all my (eight!) email accounts in one convenient place, what’s not to like? Additionally the UI kicks ass! Huge improvement over the previous stuff we’ve done. Can’t wait to make it even better for the next release.” Oji, Program Manager

“We hope you love this product as much as we have loved building it!  Enjoy!” Andy, Developer

“I really enjoyed working on the Messenger integration. It's so cool to give our customers a one-stop-shopping experience for getting in touch with their friends!” Stephen, Developer

“I was impressed by how readily the product team embraced the value of usability testing. We had a lot of support for testing not only the working code, but a lot of exploratory concepts as well. The result is a really solid, tested, user experience. We could always do more usability testing, but I’m happy to say that we really did a lot, and I think it shows.” Michael, UX Researcher

“Autodiscovery of account settings is my favorite feature for people who haven’t tried Windows Live Mail yet.  For a lot of common email service providers, WLM knows what the account settings should be and just sets it up for you.  No more trying to copy port settings from a help page!” Stacey, Developer

“Photo E-mail is the feature I’m most excited about because it delivers an elegant solution to the all too common, ‘how am I going to e-mail all these huge photos to my friends’ dilemma.” Rocky, Tester

“I am really very excited in releasing the Windows Live Mail Client to the entire world. This is an excellent client for OE users and I hope everyone will enjoy using it.” Manish, Tester

“My favorite, not so useless feature, is switch language on the fly. If you have Windows configured with two or more languages, just hit ALT SHIFT after opening a new compose window to toggle to your second language. And that’s it, you’re ready to type in your other language, with spell check and all! OK. Photomail is cool too! And so is Word Wheel! And most importantly, it’s fast! :)" Christian, Dev Manager

“I am very proud of the product we are shipping, it’s easy to come to work every day when you know the impact you are going to have in people’s daily lives through software.” Carmen, Program Manager

“Windows Live Mail is making its debut from the very beginning as a truly global product.  It is very exciting to be shipping the very first release in 35 languages and 59 markets.  I can’t wait for the world to see and use our awesome product.” Adam, Developer

From the entire Windows Live Mail team, we hope you love what we’ve built.

Written by:

Oji Udezue, Program Manager