The Windows Mail Inbox puts all your mail in easy reach.
Windows Mail in Windows Vista addresses today's serious concerns about junk mail, e-mail, and phishing attacks, while adding new features that help you search and manage the increasing volume of e-mail messages that you receive.
If you're like most people, sending e-mail is one of your most important computer activities, allowing you to keep in touch with family, friends, and colleagues across town or around the world. As the popularity and importance of e-mail have grown over the years, so, too, have its annoyances and risks.
These include junk mail, viruses delivered through e-mail and attachments, and phishing attacks aimed at acquiring your personal information and enabling criminals to steal your identity.
Windows Mail addresses these serious concerns while adding new features that help you search and manage the increasingly large number of messages you receive. Windows Mail is designed to help you easily read your e-mail while keeping you safer, and to make all of your e-mail communication fun and hassle-free.
With thousands of messages in your inbox, it can be a challenge to find the one e-mail message you want to locate. This is especially true for saved e-mail, which might be months or years old. Windows Mail includes a built-in Instant Search field, just like the one in the Windows Vista operating system. Instant Search enables you to scan across all of your e-mail quickly—without ever leaving Windows Mail. You can also find your e-mail by using the Instant Search field on the Start menu. In addition, the Search Explorer in Windows Vista is integrated with Windows Mail, so when you search your PC's hard disk drive for a particular subject, relevant e-mail messages will be found along with documents and other files.
Unwanted junk e-mail—also known as spam—continues to be a serious problem because it forces you to wade through irrelevant or offensive messages to find the e-mail you care about. To reduce this hassle, Windows Mail includes a built-in Junk Mail Filter that automatically screens e-mail to identify and separate out junk e-mail. Unlike other approaches, which require you to "train" a filter to correctly identify junk e-mail, Windows Mail starts identifying and separating junk mail the first time you use it, without any need for special settings or laborious feedback.
Phishing is a deceptive practice designed to help scam artists steal your identity by tricking you into disclosing valuable personal information, such as passwords, credit card numbers, and bank account data. Phishing scams start with phony e-mail messages that claim to be from a trusted financial institution or online service. By including links to fraudulent Web sites, phishing e-mail messages attempt to trick you into entering your personal information so it can be captured and misused by criminals. Windows Mail includes a Phishing Filter that analyzes e-mail to detect many of these fraudulent links and to help protect you from this online deception.
In the past, Microsoft Outlook Express users occasionally experienced problems when opening large data files of saved e-mail. Windows Mail is based on new technology for storing e-mail and provides significantly improved reliability. As a result, you can be more productive and have more confidence when using e-mail.
Windows Mail includes new features to help you more easily and productively contribute to and manage newsgroups. For example, Windows Mail simplifies the process of posting questions and answers and the process of rating the usefulness of information posted by other people.