How important is your email account to you? For many of us, email is our lifeline, which makes picking a proper client to use all the more important. Some email clients are better than others of course, but that’s all dependent on the features you’re looking for. For instance, some people prefer desktop clients over web applications, simply because you can still get to your emails in the event that your computer is offline.

Windows Live Mail 2011 is part of the Windows Live Essentials pack, which includes everything from Microsoft Silverlight on down to Windows Live Messenger. It helps you organize your mail, calendar, and contacts all in one place on your PC. In this article, I’m going to review the application and show you some of its newest features.

Summary

Microsoft’s latest release of Live Mail comes loaded with a lot of useful features. Since Hotmail is still one of the biggest email providers on the Internet (can you believe it? I couldn’t), the need to be able to access your email anywhere – even when offline – is very important to users.

Windows Live Mail 2011 gives you that ability. All the features you would normally have on Hotmail are present within the application, allowing you to view, manage, and send emails without having to re-learn anything.

The overall layout is very similar to Microsoft Outlook 2010, except there are a few different options and customizations. A list of your emails and folders are on the far left, your viewed messages are in the middle, and a calendar with all your important dates is on the right.

Features Of Windows Live Mail 2011

Windows Live Mail 2011 helps you organize your mail, calendar, and contacts all in one place on your PC. You can use it to check multiple email accounts, like Windows Live Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo! Mail Plus, and even see all of your stuff (emails, calendars, contacts) when you don’t have an Internet connection.

The app makes it easier to find what you’re looking for by allowing you to group conversations together. Upcoming events appear next to your inbox, and you can quickly add things to your calendar right from your inbox. Windows Live Mail also comes with a built-in search feature to help you find important messages by title, sender, or contents of a message.

WLM 2011 has a ribbon interface, and by that I mean the top of it looks like Microsoft Office. The ribbon has a lot of options on it, probably more than you’ll even need. Basic functions like compose, forward, and move are all there, as well as options for layout, folder management and accounts.

WLM 2011 syncs with your Windows Live ID account, so setup is very easy. It also includes a handy picture viewer right inside your emails. The picture viewer can actually be synced with SkyDrive, which will allow you to send/receive up to 10GB (25MB per email) of high-quality photos. SkyDrive also interacts with attachments by launching a slideshow preview.

Lastly, the inbox supports threaded messages for better organization. This is available in a collapsible tree-view list that will work even if your email provider doesn’t support threaded emails. WLM 2011 will automatically merge all of your similar emails together for you.

Conclusion

If you missed it, you can download the email client here. It basically does everything Microsoft Outlook does, for free. Sure, it’s missing a few things that Outlook has, like tasks and a full-blown calendar, but it’s definitely worth the download. It’s a strange choice by Microsoft but perhaps this is the road they’re headed down with their mail client.

I’m curious to hear what you think about Windows Live Mail 2011. Will you be downloading and giving it a try?