Hands- On with Windows 8. Mail In Windows 8. Mail app gets truly useful with new drag and drop and folder pinning capabilities, compatibility with key Outlook. Sweep, newsletter filtering and social network integration, and a newly discoverable and more useful user interface. But there is one obvious feature that is still missing: A unified inbox view. And given the direction this app has taken, I’m wondering now whether that will ever happen. More on that in a bit. But first, some of the new stuff I’ve noticed. Some of them just aren’t obvious. The app bar, previously hidden and undiscoverable, is now called out a mini app bar at the bottom that looks/works similarly to that control in Windows Phone (though it’s opaque here and not transparent). When you tap anywhere on this mini app bar (and not just on the ellipsis as in Windows Phone), you get the full app bar, and you can of course use the previously established methods for displaying this control as well. Sadly, there’s no way to “pin” it open, as one may want in a productivity app. So for example if you snap two windows or apps side- by- side, the app bar will provide a customized layout and drop the button labels to save space. So you can do things like drag a message onto the Flag icon to mark it as flagged.
Or you can drag it into a folder to move it to a new location. This is one of the main features that kept me from using Mail previously, and I’m wondering now if I’ll be using this app more regularly as a result. But you can also tap that icon to open the pane then “star” (why not “pin”? Too consistent?) a folder and pin it to the Folders view for easier access. Pinned folders appear below the list of icons and are inconsistently identified by a textual name. But that’s not how it works. Instead, the new window is treated like another app window, and the point of this view is so that you can view two email messages (or more likely, an email message and a reply) side- by- side. You see additional icons in the Folders column, including Newsletters, which uses Outlook. Windows Mail and Windows Calendar. By default Windows Vista comes with the mail program Windows Mail, the successor of Outlook Express in Windows XP.![]() Social updates, a special folder that displays updates your contacts have posted to Facebook and other networks. And in the app bar, you’ll find a Sweep button that integrates with the Sweep feature in the Outlook. The view for Exchange and Office 3. More on this on a moment. That, plus the always- visible Folders column, which is different for each account, would lead to some busy and distracting redrawing each time you selected a message from a different account in the Messages column. I think it makes a unified inbox impractical if not impossible. What makes that latter option all the more viable would be if Microsoft’s email clients, including this one, would respect the “send mail as” functionality that users configured in Outlook. Office 3. 65. It doesn’t do that. But what it does do is support Outlook. ![]() ![]() ![]() So you can send mail from an alias easily enough, and if you wish, you can even set that as the default. The big question is whether I could use this app in lieu of my current web- based apps, and it’s pretty clear that this could work nicely. A Metro app I actually use regularly? Look out for the flying pigs. My Windows Mail software suddenly stopped working and now displays an error code 0x800CCC0F for both receive and sending of mail. I have identical account settings.
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November 2017
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