It's all mobile: Mail

Windows Live Mail for Mobile (new improvements)

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 00:17:06 GMT

One of the most requested features in our recent Windows Live Mail for mobile beta was the ability to delete multiple emails at once. Now you can. Starting today you’ll see checkboxes next to email headers in your inbox. You can select multiple emails and then delete or move them with one button press. As always, we have shortcuts assigned to the most common actions, so in order to delete emails just mark them and press 7. Thanks to all the beta testers who participated in the beta and provided their valuable feedback!

To get to Windows Live Mail for mobile please browse to http://mobile.live.com from your mobile phone browser and select the Windows Live Mail link.

Michael Smuga

Making the most of Windows Live Mail: Using Contacts

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 17:06:03 GMT

As Michael Smuga said last week, now when you compose an email, you can just use a few letters of your friend's name in the To line, and it'll search your contact list for that name and prompt you with its best guesses as to which of your friends you meant:

...except it didn't quite work that way. Why not? Because Michael Smuga isn't one of my contacts. The feature only works for you if you have contacts in your contact list.

How do you add contacts? Well, there's a few different ways:

Enter contacts manually.
You could go to the PC website to do this, but you can also do it from your phone. Go back to the Inbox, and then type 6 for Contacts, then scroll off the search box and type 4 for New Contact - then fill in the form and click OK:

Now if we go back to compose, like we did above, and type "Smuga" in the To line:

Voila! The mail form knows who my buddy is now.

Add a contact from an email message.
If your buddy has already sent you an email message, you can add them directly to your contact list. Notice how there's a contact-list icon next to the From name in the message?

Selecting this link will take you to the contact card for this sender in your contact list. If you don't already have the sender in your contact list, it'll automatically pre-fill the 'Contact Add Form' from the data in the message. Once the data is pre-filled, you can simply select the Ok button to save the sender as a new Contact in your list.

It's that simple!

Import your contacts from Outlook or Outlook Express.
If you've already got contacts set up in Outlook or Outlook Express, you can import them into your online contact list. You can get instructions here:
http://www.imagine-msn.com/Hotmail/Post/Manage/ImportContacts.aspx

Remember, the more of your buddies that you have in your contact list, the easier it is to send them a mail from your mobile browser. We know how hard it is to type anything on a phone, and this is one of the ways we help you type as little as possible to do what you need to do. Let us know if there are any other ways we can make it easier to send mail from your phone!

Mike Agney

[Originally published on December 19, 2005]

Windows Live Mail for Mobile Launches!

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 17:04:22 GMT

We just launched a beta of Windows Live Mail for mobile devices. You can access it from the mobile home deck (navigate to http://mobile.live.com your phone). It’s a brand new web application that runs in all mobile browsers that can render either xHTML, cHTML or HTML (that pretty much includes all browsers running on wireless devices with color screens and which can display images).

The goal for the mobile beta version of Windows Live Mail is to provide a clean, easy to use and fast experience. Here’s a summary of what’s now available for you to explore and provide feedback to us about:

First, we used some very light graphics to make everything look nice for readability but also fast to download even on a slow connection (and if you have a very small data plan you can hide all icons altogether).

To make it easy to remember and to use, our navigation is consistent throughout the whole application and the same key shortcuts are shared with Windows Live Search (Mobile). We also have two special shortcuts: # will take you to the menu section of the page and * will take you to the top of the page. These two shortcuts are a great way to avoid manual scrolling and to speed your use.

Second, interaction with your contacts will be much easier. If you select a contact name while reading email we’ll try to find that contact in your address book, and if the contact is not in the address book you can add him or her with a single click (we’ll even pre-fill some fields for you).

Composing emails is also much easier and faster. You no longer have to memorize email addresses or open the address book and search for your contacts. You can simply enter several letters of the contact’s name in the To/Cc/Bcc fields when composing a new email and we’ll find all contacts that match what you entered in your address book. If there are multiple matches, you’ll see a list from which you can select the exact contact that you intended to email.

A significant number of our users complained about unnecessary confirmation dialogs, so we eliminated nearly all of them; if an action is reversible we no longer ask you to confirm it (so now you can delete emails without having to confirm each deletion, since you can always recover deleted emails from the trash folder).

And you no longer have to CC yourself on emails - if you want to save a copy. We’ll save a copy of each email that you send automatically in the sent emails folder.

You can find contacts quickly in the address book by using our new search functionality.

And you can even call your contacts directly from the address book by selecting “Call”

Everything else that used to be in the old MSN Hotmail application is still there: you can view folders, move emails between folders, create/edit/delete contacts and now you can do even more.

I hope you’ll enjoy the new design, and please leave comments if you have any feedback.

Michael Smuga

[Originally published on December 7, 2005]