Windows Live Mail

» see windows.microsoft.com/windows-live/mail as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

windows live mail was the free desktop email client microsoft shipped after they pulled outlook express from windows vista. version 12, released november 6 2007, was the first under the windows live brand. the last release was windows essentials 2012 in august 2012. on january 10 2017 microsoft ended support for the entire windows live essentials suite and pulled the download.

the audience for this product was specific. it was for people who had spent years inside outlook express on windows xp, then upgraded to vista or windows 7, then discovered that the new os did not include a built-in mail client at all. windows live mail filled that hole. you could read pop3 and imap accounts in the same window as hotmail and pull rss feeds into the list. it still posted to usenet newsgroups too, all without paying for outlook proper.

by 2017 most people who had used windows live mail had drifted into the browser. webmail had become the default place for email roughly between 2009 and 2012, partly because gmail's web interface had pulled ahead of every desktop client on indexing speed. the january 2017 shutdown of the essentials line was less a death than a long-running maintenance contract finally ending. the open source community produced "open live writer" from the blog tool in the same suite. nobody forked the mail client because there was no audience left waiting for one.

i missed this one. by 2007 i was on broadband at home with gmail open in firefox and had no reason to install a local mail client. the desktop-mail-client pattern had made sense in the dial-up era when you would pull your messages, hang up, then read them offline. with always-on internet that whole use case dissolved. windows live mail was a product for the cohort who stayed on the desktop a little longer than i did, mostly older relatives and small offices on slow upgrade cycles.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it shipped ~

part of windows live essentials. you ran one installer for the whole suite and had to manually uncheck everything you did not want. messenger was usually checked by default. so was the toolbar add-on for internet explorer. the installer was a known annoyance because it would also pull in onecare or live writer if you scrolled past the wrong screen.

~ what it tried to do ~

provide outlook express-class mail plus the new web layer (rss, hotmail integration, calendar sync) without making you pay for outlook. it succeeded at that for about five years. then the windows 10 mail app shipped in 2015 with a touch-first ui and microsoft started pushing every consumer toward that one. windows live mail stopped getting feature work after 2012 and the january 2017 download removal made the deprecation official.

~ what survived ~

the file format, mostly. windows live mail stored each message as an.eml file in a per-account folder, which is the same plain-text mime format that thunderbird and modern outlook also read. anyone who needs to recover an old archive can still drag the folder onto a modern client. the program itself does not run cleanly on windows 11 anymore and nobody at microsoft is going to fix that.

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