Delivering best email experience on tablet with Windows

A few weeks ago, we kicked off a blog series highlighting the new experiences and services you’ll see in Windows 8.1.

Today Kipling Knox, Group Program Manager for the Windows Communication Apps, will introduce you to the new mail experience for Windows 8.1—and it is the best email experience on any tablet. I have been using the Mail app with my Outlook.com email account and love the seamless functionality of the local and cloud experiences. I hope you will too.

Ryan Gavin
General Manager
Microsoft Apps & Services



Delivering the best email experience on any tablet

When we began working on the Mail app for Windows 8.1, we had a lot of customer feedback to consider. We also recognized that people use email today in many different ways than they have in the past, and that the email service you use can make all the difference. For us, that meant ensuring that the Mail app truly takes advantage of the Outlook.com service. It also led us to optimize the Mail app in Windows 8.1 for a modern mail experience—one that is efficient on mobile devices, built for touch, integrated into your whole life, and designed for the types of mail that matter most to you.




Mobile devices and touch are already becoming the preferred way to access email

It’s been exciting to see phones, tablets and other mobile devices grow rapidly in popularity, and to reimagine Windows as the best experience for these devices. As you’d probably guess, email is one of the most frequently performed activities for consumers on a tablet. When we take a closer look at mobile usage, we’ve seen some interesting trends emerge:

  • 68% access their Outlook.com account on a mobile device
  • More people access Outlook.com on a mobile device than on the web
  • Outlook.com mobile usage has tripled in the last year

So it’s critical for Mail to work beautifully and powerfully on tablets along with other devices.
Building for touch brought a wide range of improvements across the Mail app in Windows 8.1. There are easier ways to select one or more messages by using checkboxes in the message list. You can also drag-and-drop messages into folders—one of the most common requests we’ve had from consumers. You’ll also notice that the app bar now has a visible preview, which makes it easier to access with either mouse or touch. And the app bar is now organized more logically so you can more quickly access new features.



We’ve also invested heavily in making sure that all the most common email tasks work great. From opening messages, to searching mail on the server, to syncing all your mail across all folders—these are all as quick and reliable as you’d expect them to be. We’ve also made sure that this improved performance doesn’t come at the expense of system resources like battery life and network bandwidth.

Of course you can do serious work with an attached mouse and keyboard, and we’ve adapted our UI for that too, including hover commands on the message list, for example. But more and more people use touch to email—quickly triaging their inbox, catching up on mail from friends, and browsing through newsletters or updates from social networks—so we took special care to ensure that experience is great as well.


Great for your whole life

In a world of mobile devices like tablets, there’s an increasingly narrow distinction between your “work computer” and your “personal computer.” More and more people are bringing their personal tablets to work, and their work laptops home. Windows 8.1 is designed for this world, equally suited for your work life and your personal life. The Mail app is no exception—it’s designed to be great for your whole life.

In this update to Mail, we’ve optimized for using both work and personal email accounts, without having to switch apps or go to the web. This feature makes it simple to set up, monitor, and toggle between different email accounts. And we’ve added advanced multi-account features, like the ability to change the return address of your email if a message was sent to the wrong account. You’ll also find support for advanced IT policies (like authenticated proxies and special certificates), thanks to our complete implementation of the EAS protocol. This means you can bring your device to work, and still meet the requirements of your company’s network.


Designed for the email that matters to you

These days, most of us get very different and distinct types of email—newsletters, daily deals, social updates, and personal messages, and in fact, more than 80% of email in your inbox is commercial mail. While that mail can be valuable and interesting, it also means that it can be easy to miss messages from important people. So we asked ourselves how we could help automatically organize your inbox, sorting out messages by type, and create customized views of the email that’s most important to you. To meet this goal in Windows 8.1, we added a new toolbar to Mail on the left-hand side: what we affectionately call the power pane.

As soon as you set up a new account, Mail analyzes your inbox and identifies people with whom you communicate frequently. You’ll see these people marked as favorites in the People view. If you open up the People view menu (just click the “People” link under the icon), you’ll see even more people suggested as favorites. Click on a person, and you see all the email you’ve exchanged with them, across your folders. If you click the People icon, you’ll see all the email from all your favorites. This is a helpful way to track email just from people who you’ve marked as important—and filter out email from everyone else. The People view adapts over time, based on your email habits (though once you mark someone as a favorite, that label sticks until you change it). So you might not see a lot of people in this view at first, but over time, it will fill out to capture your most important communications.



Mail enables you to mark folders as favorites, too. Just open the folder menu and click the stars for the folders you want to place on the power pane. Then you can drag and drop messages to these folders without having to navigate a long list of folders each time. You can also access and drag messages to your complete folder list at any time.
And if you use Outlook.com for your email, the mail experience gets even better:

  • Newsletters and social updates are automatically recognized and organized into a special view below your inbox. If you don’t want a certain type of email categorized in this way, however, you simply drag that mail out of the view and back into your inbox.
  • You now have access to Outlook.com’s powerful Sweep feature right from the Mail app. Select one or more messages, choose Sweep from the app bar, and choose how you want to sweep away that email. You can even choose to do this automatically every time you get email from certain senders.
  • You can set up automatic replies in case you’re going away and won’t be able to respond to messages.
  • And because Outlook.com uses Exchange ActiveSync, your Outlook.com contacts and calendar are also automatically synced with your Windows 8.1 device.



Let us know what you think

So if you ask us what’s most interesting about this update to the email experience on Windows 8.1, we’ll say that we think it’s the best email experience for tablets. But at the same time, we worked hard to make it the most complete email experience possible—one that spans your whole life, works equally well across different devices, provides custom views and powerful tools for staying up-to-date and organized, and delivers on the fundamentals. We hope you agree, and we encourage you to keep the feedback coming! Kipling Knox
Group Program Manager
Windows Communication Apps

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I am actually pretty happy with the 8.1 Mail app, and not just in relation to the terrible 8.0 Mail app ;)

It's not as full featured as stand alone Outlook, but it can connect to Exchange, Yahoo, AOL, Google, IMAP, etc... so
 

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On 8.0 i have a client that has a yahoo account. I used outlook.com to set it up
It synced up everything but his contacts
I heard lots have this same problem. I am wondering if this is fixed in 8.1
 

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With 8.1 on RT you get full Outlook as part of office now. I set mine up when I got 8.1 but have never used it since the mail app works well enough and better with touch.
 

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On 8.0 i have a client that has a yahoo account. I used outlook.com to set it up
It synced up everything but his contacts
I heard lots have this same problem. I am wondering if this is fixed in 8.1

Not sure what you mean by using Outlook.com, Robin. Do you mean via a browser? If so, I didn't know that was possible, nor did I see the possibility online. But I'm a man. I could be looking straight at something and not see it. :D

I don't have a Yahoo account, but I set up two Live accounts and one Gmail account via the app on both 8 and 8.1RP. All three work flawless in every aspect.
 

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This was via the mail app. It synced all his email but non of his 202 contacts are showing up
 

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I wound up using the browser instead and went to his yahoo account that way. I set it up too open to his sign in page
 

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    4gigs
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    atm randioum
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This was via the mail app. It synced all his email but non of his 202 contacts are showing up

I'm sure you have, but just to double check; You have "Show contacts" on within that account?

If so, perhaps it's the Yahoo server that's at fault with syncing. Just a thought.
 

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    Acer AL1917W A LCD
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IMHO, the email client in 8.1 is no better than the one in 8, neither allow me to customize the app to my liking. For instance, I absolutely hate having the preview panel always open on the right-hand side of the screen and always turn that off but I can't do that with either version.

Lack of customization alone would prevent me from ever considering this email client as "best email experience on a tablet".
 

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    W10 Pro (desktop), W10 (laptop), W10 Pro (tablet)
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    Home built i7-8700K, Hp Envy x360 EVO Laptop, MS Surface Pro 7
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    3.7Ghz Core i7-8700K, 11th Gen Core i7-1165G7 4.7Ghz, 10th Gen Core™ i5-1035G4 1.1Ghz
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    ASUS TUF Z370-Pro Gaming, HP, MS
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    AMD Radeon RX580, Intel Iris X Graphics, Intel Iris Plus Graphics G4
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    Dual Samsung U32J59 32 inch monitors, 13.3" display, 12.3" display
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    3840x2160 (Desktop), 1920x1080 (laptop), 2736x1824 Pro 7
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    500GB ssd boot drive with 2 & 10TB Data (Desktop), 512GB ssd (laptop), 128GB SSD (tablet)
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    Antec 100
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    IBM Model M - used continuously since 1986
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    Retired in 2015 after working in the tech industry for 41 years. First 10 years as a Technician, the rest as a programmer/software engineer. After 1 year of retirement, I was bored so went back to work as a Robotic Process Automation Consultant. Retired for 3rd (and final) time in 2019.
Yes. Show contacts in the app is on
And we tried sending an email and when clicking on the To nothing came up
 

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    desktop/laptop
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    4gigs
    Graphics Card(s)
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My live accounts work fine on my computer testing the mail app but i do not have a yahoo account to test. Maybe it does have something to do with the yahoo servers
 

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    desktop/laptop
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    4gigs
    Graphics Card(s)
    atm randioum
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    350,250
IMHO, the email client in 8.1 is no better than the one in 8, neither allow me to customize the app to my liking. For instance, I absolutely hate having the preview panel always open on the right-hand side of the screen and always turn that off but I can't do that with either version.

Lack of customization alone would prevent me from ever considering this email client as "best email experience on a tablet".

Except that it's not a preview. That's the actual message window. There is no other. "Preview" indicates there is a view somewhere else, which there is not.

Can you tell me of another Tablet email app that does what you suggest?
 

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    Onboard Audio
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    Auria 27" IPS + 2x Samsung 23"
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    2560x1440 + 2x 2048x1152
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Yeah, I thought about it not actually being a preview when I was typing my post but regardless, the fact that I can't turn it off is the issue.

I don't have a Win 8 tablet so can't recommend an app for that platform. On my Nexus 7 tablet, I use an email app called K9 that allows me to customize the view so I don't see the contents of a message unless I want to see it.
 

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    3.7Ghz Core i7-8700K, 11th Gen Core i7-1165G7 4.7Ghz, 10th Gen Core™ i5-1035G4 1.1Ghz
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    ASUS TUF Z370-Pro Gaming, HP, MS
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    16G, 8G, 8G
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    AMD Radeon RX580, Intel Iris X Graphics, Intel Iris Plus Graphics G4
    Sound Card
    ATI High Definition Audio (Built-in to mobo)
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    Dual Samsung U32J59 32 inch monitors, 13.3" display, 12.3" display
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    3840x2160 (Desktop), 1920x1080 (laptop), 2736x1824 Pro 7
    Hard Drives
    500GB ssd boot drive with 2 & 10TB Data (Desktop), 512GB ssd (laptop), 128GB SSD (tablet)
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    Corsair CX 750M
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    Antec 100
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    Coolermaster CM 212+
    Keyboard
    IBM Model M - used continuously since 1986
    Mouse
    Microsoft IntelliMouse
    Internet Speed
    665Mbps/15Mbps down/up
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    FireFox, MS Edge
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    Defender on all
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    Retired in 2015 after working in the tech industry for 41 years. First 10 years as a Technician, the rest as a programmer/software engineer. After 1 year of retirement, I was bored so went back to work as a Robotic Process Automation Consultant. Retired for 3rd (and final) time in 2019.
I was referring to the email apps included by the vendors.

But ok, if you want to bring in third parties.. K-9 has a lot of problems.. For instance, it doesn't integrate with the servers junk mail filtering well. Yes, I know k-9 has it's own spam filter, but that means you have to download the spam first. If your server has junk filtering, then you don't have to download it. But since k-9 doesn't let you market things as spam or not spam on the server, other than moving it out of the folder, it can't learn on the server what is spam from you.

Another issue is that K-9 is incredibly slow.

So i'd hardly rate it as "best"
 

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    Gigabyte Z77X-UD4 TH
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    nVidia GTX 650
    Sound Card
    Onboard Audio
    Monitor(s) Displays
    Auria 27" IPS + 2x Samsung 23"
    Screen Resolution
    2560x1440 + 2x 2048x1152
    Hard Drives
    Corsair m4 256GB, 2 WD 2TB drives
    Case
    Antec SOLO II
    Keyboard
    Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000
    Mouse
    Logitech MX
You have a point about the spam folder. Another issue with K-9 is that I can't access other folders I have setup on the server. I don't have any issues with it being incredibly slow so can't comment on that. I never tried to claim it was "best", just that it's much better than either of the Win 8 email clients I've tried and thus eliminates the 8.1 client from being considered "best email experience on a tablet" for me.

To be perfectly honest, I very rarely ever check email using my phone or my tablet. I spend 8+ hours a day on my computer and am constantly sending/receiving emails so when I'm away from my computer, I tend to avoid checking email. For me to use the email client in Win 8 or 8.1, it would need to be considered within the same class as any number of other "desktop" type email clients such as Outlook, Beehive, Thunderbird, etc... all of which allow me far more customization options.
 

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    W10 Pro (desktop), W10 (laptop), W10 Pro (tablet)
    Computer type
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    System Manufacturer/Model
    Home built i7-8700K, Hp Envy x360 EVO Laptop, MS Surface Pro 7
    CPU
    3.7Ghz Core i7-8700K, 11th Gen Core i7-1165G7 4.7Ghz, 10th Gen Core™ i5-1035G4 1.1Ghz
    Motherboard
    ASUS TUF Z370-Pro Gaming, HP, MS
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    16G, 8G, 8G
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    AMD Radeon RX580, Intel Iris X Graphics, Intel Iris Plus Graphics G4
    Sound Card
    ATI High Definition Audio (Built-in to mobo)
    Monitor(s) Displays
    Dual Samsung U32J59 32 inch monitors, 13.3" display, 12.3" display
    Screen Resolution
    3840x2160 (Desktop), 1920x1080 (laptop), 2736x1824 Pro 7
    Hard Drives
    500GB ssd boot drive with 2 & 10TB Data (Desktop), 512GB ssd (laptop), 128GB SSD (tablet)
    PSU
    Corsair CX 750M
    Case
    Antec 100
    Cooling
    Coolermaster CM 212+
    Keyboard
    IBM Model M - used continuously since 1986
    Mouse
    Microsoft IntelliMouse
    Internet Speed
    665Mbps/15Mbps down/up
    Browser
    FireFox, MS Edge
    Antivirus
    Defender on all
    Other Info
    Retired in 2015 after working in the tech industry for 41 years. First 10 years as a Technician, the rest as a programmer/software engineer. After 1 year of retirement, I was bored so went back to work as a Robotic Process Automation Consultant. Retired for 3rd (and final) time in 2019.
When looking in the account info for yahoo it only shows. Sync emails, there is no option for sync contacts
I went into the People app and looked in the settings to try to set up yahoo there but there is no option for it, only for gmail
Where is Show Account? I cannot find that, it shows both the outook.com we set up which has no contacts and the yahoo account
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    4 Windows 7 Pro Sp1- 4 Win 8 Pro, 1- xp pro sp3
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Dell Optiplex 390, 380, 3 Vostro Laptops (7 computers in all)
    CPU
    desktop/laptop
    Memory
    4gigs
    Graphics Card(s)
    atm randioum
    Hard Drives
    350,250
When looking in the account info for yahoo it only shows. Sync emails, there is no option for sync contacts
I went into the People app and looked in the settings to try to set up yahoo there but there is no option for it, only for gmail
Where is Show Account? I cannot find that, it shows both the outook.com we set up which has no contacts and the yahoo account

My sincere apology. I'm sorry I sent you on a wild goose case. Contacts are configured in the People app, not the Mail app. :eek:

People app > Charms > Settings > Accounts > Yahoo? Does Yahoo show up there?

For my Gmail account it has a link to "Manage online" which takes me to a page to configure in my MS account online. Please keep in mind that I sign into my 8 and 8.1RP with my MS account.

Update: I think this is my final answer. :D

People app > Charms > Settings > Options. Yahoo should be listed there. Make sure the box is check marked.

I hope that solves your problem.
 
Last edited:

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    Acer T690
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    Intel Pentium D Dual Core
    Motherboard
    Acer/Intel E946GZ
    Memory
    2GB (max upgrade)
    Graphics Card(s)
    Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3000 - PCI Express x16
    Sound Card
    Integrated RealTek ALC888 high-definition audio with 7.1 channel audio support
    Monitor(s) Displays
    Acer AL1917W A LCD
    Screen Resolution
    1440 X 900
    Hard Drives
    350 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10
    Thumb drives
    PSU
    Standard 250 watt
    Case
    Desktop 7.2" (183mm) W x 17.5" (445mm) L x 14.5"
    Cooling
    Dual case fans + CPU fan
    Keyboard
    Acer Windows PS/2
    Mouse
    Wireless Microsoft Arc
    Internet Speed
    54mbp/s
    Browser
    IE11
    Antivirus
    Defender
    Other Info
    Office Pro 2013 / Nokia Lumia 1520 Windows Phone 8.1DP GDR1
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