Alternative to Outlook Express adds spam filtering and photo sharing

Microsoft has released the latest version of Windows Live Mail (a program similar to Outlook Express) that adds spam/junk e-mail filtering and easy photo sharing capabilities.

Windows Live Mail offers customizable junk (spam) e-mail filtering including an option to only allow mail from a Safe Senders List into your Inbox.

The Photo E-mail composition window lets you easily insert pictures from your computer, which get converted to thumbnail-size and you can add captions and borders. If you sign-up for a free Windows Live account, or have a current live.com, hotmail.com or msn.com account, your full-size photos will be automatically uploaded to a private online storage area and held for 30 days. The advantage of the online storage of the full-size photos is that it lets you send more photos in an e-mail which are small file size, without getting close to the 10MB-per-email size limit imposed by many e-mail service providers.

For example I recently sent an email with approximately 20 pictures. If I had sent the e-mail with another program without down-sizing the pictures, the combined size of all the pictures would have been over 10 MB. However sending the pictures using Windows Live Mail, the thumbnail-size pictures embedded in the e-mail only added up to 200KB. When I sent the e-mail Windows Live Mail it automatically uploaded the 10MB+ full-size photos online. The e-mail recipients can click on the pictures in the e-mail to be taken to a web page with full-size pictures which they can view as a slide show or download any or all pictures to their computer.

Windows Live Mail also has a handy search feature for email messages or contacts that narrows down the the list of search results as you type. A calendar lets you organize your schedule and syncronize it to an online calendar.

You can get Windows Live Mail and other Windows Live software from the Windows Live Downloads website. If you would like Computer Techs to install Windows Live Mail and show you how to use it, please contact us.