Win 7 - Live Mail or something else?

[manalishi]

Am halfway through migrating two old PCs from Vista & XP to a single Win 7 laptop PC.

Am now at the bit where I need to transfer emails over, and I see that Win 7 has something called 'Live Mail' instead of the older Windows Mail and Outlook Express. Curiously, Live Mail is rather buried in the Start menu (unlike MS' older email software) - is it that bad?

Q is: should I bother with that or look for a better email client?

I use email for business so need it to reliably store several hundred messages (that I can't just throw away). And if I'm changing to another program, I'd ideally like some clever archiving features so that the speed isn't burdened by old messages.

All ideas welcome.

 

[Merc Owner 2B]

Due to anti-monopoly (competition) laws, MS have been forced to not include email clients with UK and European versions of Win 7.

Windows LIVE MAIL is available as a download as are many other clients.

I use Live Mail quite happilly as you can import previous mail files from both XP and Vista.

 

[Spin_bowler]

Live mail works well for me for personal use. I especially like the fact that I can maintain a central mailbox on multiple machines without having to worry about syncing them or where messages are saved etc. However, I am not sure how secure it all is and where/how you back messages up locally if it's possible.

 

[manalishi]

Thanks guys. Seems like I need to do some more research about this central mailbox - potentially useful to me. Although my GF would think that not being able to get at business email on Sat/Sun would be A Good Thing.

 

[wemorgan]

I've been using Windows Live Mail for about 6 months now. It basically synchronises with my Hotmail account what ever PC I use, so it's quite handy for me.

 

[verytalldave]

I use Hotmail............

What are the differences between Live Mail and Hotmail other than being able to mail in real time like Skype?

 

[wemorgan]

I use Hotmail............

What are the differences between Live Mail and Hotmail other than being able to mail in real time like Skype?

To me subtle ones, nothing major I'd say.

Hotmail: you have an open browser and need to refresh to look for new messages
Live: It is an open application like Outlook so auto looks for new mail

Hotmail: Since it's a browser it can be slow to attach documents
Live: You drag and drop files from your local disk, so is near instant.

Live has a better Calendar system.

I'm sure there's plenty more, but that's what I use.

 

[manalishi]

OK. I've done some testing on Live Mail.

First curiosity is that it made a complete set of default folders under each POP3 account that I'd imported. That might be useful (not sure yet), although quite what it'll do when I import the messages from Vista's email export data... (fingers crossed that it's intelligent to work it out for itself)

 

[Gawdi]

Check out Mozilla Thunderbird - the best email client there is..

 

[crockers]

Surely any email application can access email from a central server if set up as SMTP ? It only becomes "tied" to a specific machine if that machine is set up as a POP account. Or have I got that all wrong?