This post will appeal to Mail users who keep an eye on the wider picture or who live partly in a Windows world.

As Microsoft revs itself up to deliver Windows Vista sometime next year, it is working on the next generation of email clients for the new OS, Windows Mail and Windows Live Mail Desktop.

Bryan Starbuck , the development lead for Windows email clients, has posted a feature list of the two apps:

Windows Mail, which Hawk Wings has already covered , is the new name for Outlook Express. It is the default client in Windows Vista, Apple Mail’s most direct “competitor”.

You can read more about it on Microsoft’s Vista preview site or watch a 46 min video demo.

Windows Live Mail Desktop is a more ambiguous project. It aims to broaden the scope of “the email experience” by integrating RSS feeds and web searches into its interface.

The RSS feed feature sounds clever. It will allow you to forward or email your thoughts about a particular blog post to the author as you read it. Search-as-you-type promises to locate information quickly.

Active Search will be great, Bryan says :

Active Search bridges the gap between your inbox and the broader web using the power of search. Using Active Search is essentially the same as conducting a ton of related searches the old fashioned way – by cutting and pasting terms from your email into a separate web browser – only without all the effort.

Screenshots of the next Outlook beta speak for themselves .outlook, windows, vista, email, windows mail, windows live mail desktop, RSS feeds, searching

Similar Posts:

• Outlook Express to become “Windows Mail”
• Screenshot of Mail.app’s Windows Vista rival
• Google offers blog search
• Windows Vista, Outlook 12 to support .ics format
• Icon replacement tutorial for Mail.app

Tags: email, outlook, RSS feeds, searching, vista, windows, windows live mail desktop, windows mail

This entry was posted on Sunday, 11th June, 2006 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Email in general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.