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    September 18

    Windows Live Mail Wave 3 – How to Create New Stationary

    Unless I’m mistaken (which I very well might be) there appears to be a new button in Windows Live Mail Wave 3 beta to allow users to easily create their own stationary.

    CreateNew

    I’m come across numerous posts in the public newsgroups from people asking how to do this. So here’s a very quick rundown using the new Windows Live Mail Wave 3 beta.

    Firstly go to Tools/Options menu and select the Compose tab.  As you will see from the screenshot above, there is a “Create New” button next to stationary. Click on this and the stationary creation wizard will open :-

    Wizard

    Click “Next” and you will be taken to a screen asking what image you wish to use, where to position it, the background color for your email message etc :-

    Wizard2

    After you have customized your background click next to proceed to the next step of the wizard.

    Wizard3

    The next step lets you choose the default font, size and whether you wish bold or italics :-

    Wizard4

    Clicking next takes you to a screen where you can position your text. If you have included a picture, you might notice that the text will overwrite part of your background image and therefore be quite hard to view :-

    Wizard5

    By adjusting the left and top margins you an position your text to be displayed under your background image :-

    Wizard6

    Finally you need to give your stationary a name :-

    Wizard7

    click Finish and you’re done. Now all you need to do is to choose that stationary by clicking the checkbox next to either mail or news (or both if you so wish), clicking on the “Select” button and selecting the stationary you have just saved :-

    ChooseStationary

    And that’s all there is to it.  If however you want to get a little more involved in with your stationary, then you can manually edit the resulting stationary file using your favorite editor such as Expression Web or Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.  You will find your stationary saved under “My Documents\My Stationary” folder on your hard drive. The stationary file is a simple HTML document, so as long as you know some basic HTML then it’s very easy to amend.  Here is the code generated by the stationary wizard :-

    <HTML>
    <HEAD>
    <STYLE>
    BODY {
    font-family: Arial;
    font-size: 12pt;
    color: ffffff;
    margin-top: 50 px;
    background-position: top center;
    background-repeat: no-repeat;
    }
    </STYLE>
    </HEAD>
    <BODY id="ridBody" background="MSNWindowsLive.jpg">
    <BODY id="ridBody" bgcolor="c0c0c0">
    </BODY>
    </HTML>

    Please note however that there is a bug in this code in that there should not be two opening <BODY> element tags.
    1:05 PM | Add a comment | Read comments (1) | Permalink | Blog it | Wave 3 Beta
    September 17

    Windows Live Wave 3 and Windows Live Mail

    For those of you who haven’t heard the news yet, Windows Live Wave 3 beta has been launched.

    WLGetTheBetas

    You can get them here.

    I’ve already downloaded and installed them and after a two minute test have uncovered a number of bugs and things I hope will get changed in later builds. For the moment however here is a quick overview of the new Windows Live Mail Wave 3 Beta.

    For the most part, not a lot has changed in Windows Live Mail (WLM). One of the major changes is that there are no longer any icons in the toolbar :-

    WLMToolBar

    However this goes across all the Wave 3 products and not just Windows Live Mail. For example, the new Beta of Windows Live Writer that I’m using to write this post has also lost all of it’s icons. This is something that I’m hoping is not in the final design and that we do go back to the choices we had before (icons, icons and text or text only). I’ve looked through the menu’s and can’t see a way to get icons back but admittedly I’ve not looked everywhere so far.

    WLMVersion

    The new version reads V14.x.x  The reason for the jump is get every product up to the same build numbers (and I think also to get inline with the upcoming Office v14).

    The way newsgroups are displayed has changed. In the last version the system truncated the beginning of the newsgroup name and showed you the end which was useful. This one goes back to the way Windows Live Mail was originally, in that it displays the full name of the newsgroup however it wraps the group name which makes things very hard to read :-

    WLMNGList

    Whilst on the subject of newsgroups, the toolbar “Headers” button downloads the next “x” number of headers for a particular newsgroup. This defaults to 300 however it can be changed up to 1000 under the tools/options menu.  The tooltip for the headers button however appears to have been hardcoded to 300. Therefore no matter what you change the number of headers to in the options, the tooltip will always display 300. It does however download the number of headers requested and not just 300.

    WLMHeadersBug

    One major addition now is the integration of the Calendar with WLM. It hooks directly into your Windows Live Calendar and appears to have fairly good integration with your mail etc. :-

    WLMCalendar

    So there’s a quick 2 minute overview of some of the new features and bugs found in Windows Live Mail Wave 3 beta.

    3:39 PM | Add a comment | Permalink | Blog it | Wave 3 Beta