Sam Davyson

Want to get Live Mail for yourself now? Just read these instructions.

This continues from Part 1. Which I published earlier, and can be read here.

So the screen that you get when you log in with Firefox is something like below. It tells you that the mail beta has not been built fully for the browser that you are using. And that you should maybe use another browser (IE) for the moment.

[ View this screenshot in large. ]

I suppose that I have to admit this is fair enough. This service is not yet on general release. And credit to the Mail Beta team: you can read your mail in Firefox. You just have to use a slightly degraded interface to do so. Basically you lose the new parts of the interface, and what you are left with is much like the current version of Hotmail, with a slightly whiter stylesheet. For instance you lose the preview pane, and you lose the drag drop features.

So now I go to IE. And I login. The login page is probably temporary. But it sets the style for the service to follow. It is cleaner than what you see at the moment. And it is completely white. The first page that greets you when you sign in is the Today tab. This is shown on the screenshot below. I really thought that this would go in the new version. In the past it was always in the irritating jump page with Hotmail. It simply delayed your access to your inbox. And Hotmail used it to display particularly large adverts. They would argue that the function of the Today tab was to give you a dynamic view of your mail. Just the mail that is important to you. At a glance. But it never really worked.

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They seemed to have departed from this a bit. And the Today tab no longer lists any of the mail that I have got at all. Instead it tells me about the new features in Windows Live Mail Beta. At the moment the new thing seems to be deleting mail. Which seems particularly funny to me after just recently when Gmail equipped themselves with a delete button. Anyway, you can see that the Mail Beta team have been kind enough to allow us to see how many messages we have got from the Today tab, even if we can’t actually see what they are.

You may also notice how much screen space the large banners that tell you how good the Mail Beta is take up. And these banners, quite ironically, degrade the user experience sufficiently to make the Mail Beta overall quite terrible to use. I am not sure if they will be there when they generally release the Mail Beta. Quite probably not. Although I imagine that they might just be replaced with much more varied adverts from outside advertisers. These could be just as, or even more, intrusive.

Notice also that the interface ends just at the bottom of the broswer window. This is all part of the feel of a desktop application I think. But I found on a 1024 by 768 screen (which I believe is currently the average) this style leads to a few too many scrollbars than might normally be liked. You’ll see this in action when we actually get to the stage when Mail is seen. Lets do this now.

There are a few ways to reach the inbox from the first screen. You can click “Mail” in the tabs at the top. Or you can click Inbox at the side. The whole tab structure is somewhat degraded by the way that the bar with “Inbox, Sent Messages etc” stays in its position even when the tab is changed from Today to Mail. You could also argue that this is a good design feature as it helps to build a consistent layout. When you click the Mail tab you see:

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Where is your mail then? It is in the second column from the left. They have squeezed the inbox up in terms of horizontal width. This means a break away from the traditional one line per email. Now the senders name goes on the line above the subject. This means that the emails become much more square than before. This is kind of alright. And although it means your emails are more tricky to see than prehaps previously. It does really support the design for the new drag and drop features. Dragging and dropping an email is much more intuitive when the email is more square shaped.

The actual viewing of emails is therefore actually done on the third column from the left. In the preview pane. You notice that the first email in the list is shaded in blue. This means that it shows up in the preview pane to the right. However you will also notice than there doesn’t seem to be any mail displayed. Reading the text in the box reveals that the images have been blocked to protect my privacy. How nice. How very Gmail. There is a little link to show the content. And when it is shown the biggest problem with this Mail Beta becomes immediate obvious.

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As you can see. The email is a full sized image. Much like a lot of Junk Mail. But it isn’t designed to be read in a preview pane. So it doesn’t fit in the preview pane. The response by Mail Beta is to add scrollbars. Two of them. One to scroll up and down around the image, and the other to scroll left and right. Add to the situation the fact that immediately to the left I already have a scrollbar to scroll up and down my inbox. And also add the fact the the whole window already has a scroll bar to fit the large “Drag. Drop. You’re Done.” banner on the page… I have too many scroll bars.

If you imagine that in some places (not many I know, but some) they still use the 800 by 600 resolution. You can imagine that there are going to be a lot of problems with this. Obviously you don’t get it so much with text email (unless you have been emailed a long registration link or something) but it is certainly something that I think need improving.

Another thing to notice is that this Mail Beta keeps emails seperate. It doesn’t implement anything like conversations. This is a feature that blew most people away when they saw it in Gmail. I know that it did me. I certainly would never chose to move to a provider that couldn’t offer me a conversation view. I would just never be able to keep track of all the messages. This Mail Beta, I repeat, does not offer this conversation style threading.

So now comes the big feature. As you seem on the screenshot below it is advertised on both of the advertising spaces (top and right) “Drag. Drop. You’re Done.”. Brilliant. Sounds good. And it is. The Mail Beta allows you to move your mail around through clicking on it and dragging it to where you want it to be. This is something that the Mail Beta from Yahoo! also offers. It is not however something that would really work in Gmail’s interface, and it is not offered.

[ View this screenshot in large. ]

The message that I am dragging to the deleted items area was the first message in my inbox. And as ou can see it becomes faded in the listings. A nice touch. The message that I carry around at the end of my mouse is also faded. It is transparent in fact. However I found that it as difficult to see exactly where you are dropping the message because the message itself gets in the way. However if you let go of it it just falls into the deleted items and the inbox list updates to remove the message. It does this kind of dynamically, and the whole page does not reload in the procedure. This is again a nice touch,that will save time.
There is an alternative for deleting. And it is a method that I much prefer. You simply right click on the message and you get a context menu which allows you to chose between various options. You can reply, reaply all, forward, print, mark as read, mark as unread, and view the source. Quite a neat set of options for a right click menu. And again once deleted the message is removed from the list dynamically.

So now you have read your mail. How about writing some? Well in this area there has been sustantially less innovation I feel. The compose screen is not at all dissimilar to the one that is currently available. That is in terms of what it can do. I admit that it looks cleaner. It has the new white background. And it keeps the left hand toolbar there, so you are only one click from any of your emails. That it quite good.

[ View this screenshot in large. ]

The CC and BCC are both hidden by default. This probably reflected the fact that (in general) people do not use these functions. Gmail does the same for when you replay to emails. They are hidden, but can be reshown with a click of a link. Like is shown above. The editor for rich text is essentially the same as before. Although it seems particularly slow to me. The button to get to the compose screen is also the same as before. The “New” link that is in the top left of every page in the Mail tab.

When you type in the addresses you’ll notice a new feature. Auto complete. This completes the addresses of the contacts that you have in your contacts list. This feature appears in Yahoo Mail and Gmail at the moment. However instead of automatically adding those people that you send emails to to your contacts list (like Gmail does) this Mail Beta asks you after you have sent your message whether the contact should be added. This is a slightly different approach.

Once you are done composing your email, and adding attachments has been streamlined significantly, you simply hit the send button which has moved to the very top left. A little box pops up from the bottom to inform you that your request is being worked on. And then you get that screen that ask you whether the contact should be added to your list.

Navigating away from the compose screen when you have written something in the compose box results in a pop up being displayed to warn you that you will lose what is show in the box. This is exactly the way that Gmail handles this feature. Which a very similar JavScript warning box.
Another important change is that Sent Items are automatically saved. And attachments on your sent mail are not automatically saved. This seems like a very biazarre half measure to me. But obviously it saves your storage space. You can however make it save the attachments on any outgoing message by using the tick box next to the compose box. I don’t know if it can be set to tick itself by default. Gmail saves all sent mail and attachments by default. This cannot be changed.

The remaining two tabs in the interface I will not explore. I have shown the basic way in which this new client works. The calender and contacts list have not been majorly rebranded at all. And the contacts list uses a three panel system very similar to that seen on the mail tab.

Conclusions

I hope that I have given you some idea of how the new Mail Beta works and feels. The question is how will everyone respond when it is released to the public. Is it an imporvement to Hotmail? Is it enough to keep Hotmail users at Hotmail? Is it not too much of a departure of the original to keep computer old users of Hotmail happy? Lots of questions. I think that the final verison will look and feel a little different to all the screenshots shown and linked to above. It is a working product. It is however very different to previous versions of Hotmail. There is no getting away from that. Whilst to me it still doesn’t feel like a desktop client, you can see that it is more of desktop client than any previous version. And it is easily to do more thigs with it quickly. I am sure the Hotmail world will love it when it is released. Well they will firstly hate it, but then see how much more they can do with their mail, and soon love it.

However I think this interface is a far cry from Gmail. It is not Gmail. It is different to Gmail. It feels different, it works different, it is different. For me this new Mail Beta is not good enough for a switch from Gmail, mainly because it doesn’t support the conversation feature. But also because I think that the Gmail interface is still neater, cleaner, more organised, and better for managing your email. What do you think?