The latest version of Windows Live Mail (currently in development) has addressed a major reason why I couldn’t switch to it, the failure to update feeds. When it was clear that IE was able to update its feed count, there seemed no clear reason why WLM, which uses IE to supply it with feed XML, couldn’t work out that updates had occurred. Maybe this means that Outlook’s RSS feeds will work as well. It should now be possible for me to switch to two email clients instead of three at home. The mail system has stopped flagging Gmail’s “[Gmail]” IMAP folder as a problem, though it needs to understand that its own junk mail folder is not part of Gmail and it should not flag errors for that folder.
WLW, which I’m using to write this post, has also been updated and now has a toolbar with justification buttons on it. It seems to be able to display inline Google maps now without crashing. One thing I dislike about both is the insipid colour scheme, which replaced strong UI background colours with washed out ones.