Windows Live Mail hangs with some feeds; big improvements for IMAP users

I’ve been testing the Windows Live Mail beta for some weeks at home now. Finally, Microsoft have put an official download page on live.com for it. One of the areas in which I have seen persistent problems is with blog feeds. If the server providing the feed returns invalid or incomplete data, WLM simply hangs, whereas IE7, which acts as the feed agent for WLM, can tell us simply that the feed is invalid, incomplete or missing.

Apart from that issue WLM looks very useful and once the bugs are out of it I will be recommending it for staff use here. A major benefit is the way in which it handles IMAP mail accounts (we use IMAP on our mail server here). All Microsoft mail clients up to this point, including Outlook 2003, store the Sent Items in a local folder on the computer rather than in the Sent Items folder on the IMAP server. This means that the benefits of IMAP, which assume that all the mail remains on the mail server, are lost to a certain extent. WLM has settings to specify IMAP folder names for Sent Items, Junk Mail, Drafts and Deleted Items. The folders on the server will be used for all these if the option is enabled. I’ve found it works well with an IMAP account I am using.