Windows Live Mail

Windows Live Mail

Windows Live Mail 2012 running on Windows 8
Developer(s)	Microsoft
Final release	2012 (v16.4.3528.0331) (November 4, 2014; 9 years ago (2014-11-04)) [±]
Operating system	Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 8[1]
Type	Email client News client Feed reader Electronic calendar
License	Freeware

Windows Live Mail (formerly named Windows Live Mail Desktop, code-named Elroy^[2]) is a discontinued freeware email client from Microsoft. It was the successor to Windows Mail in Windows Vista, which was the successor to Outlook Express in Windows XP and Windows 98. Windows Live Mail is designed to run on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, but is also compatible with Windows 8^[1] and Windows 10, even though Microsoft bundles a new email client, named Windows Mail, with the latter.^[3] In addition to email, Windows Live Mail also features a calendar, an RSS feed reader, and a Usenet newsreader.

Windows Live Mail moved away from the older Microsoft mail programs, such as Outlook Express, which stored all e-mails comprising a folder (such as the Inbox) in a single .dbx file. In order to provide greater flexibility (and to avoid the problem where corruption of a single .dbx file could delete multiple emails), Windows Live Mail stores each email message as a separate .eml file. Only the folder structure is maintained in a single database file, using the ESE (Extensible Storage Engine) database structure, named Mail.MSMessageStore (which also holds some metadata for each .eml file on the system, so can be a huge file). The program also maintains a backup copy of that file, in the Backup sub-folder, so problems are rare. At a pinch, the Mail.MSMessageStore file can be recreated from the data in the .eml files.^{[citation needed]}