Intalled S&D and now Windows Mail not working

[mentalunrest]

I have installed the latest version of S&D and now my windows mail does not work. It is extremely sluggish and locks up.

My internet seems perfectly fine and have no trouble using firefox and IE

I have windows Vista. Keep in mind that I am not a computer genius, so please dumb down your replies.


Thanks

[DougCuk]

While WinMail may look like the Outlook Express we all came to trust - it is in fact a complete rewrite done specially for Vista and unfortunately it has many bugs and is prone to problems with its data files. MS have apparently now given up fixing WinMail and now just recommend swapping to LiveMail if you have problems.

That said there is a registry fix that solves the extreme slowness and apparent lockups. The problem is due to WinMail loading the large Restricted sites list used by Spybot Immunise to protect the Internet Browser. This feature is called Mime Sniffing and was supposed to be a security enhancement - but the code they used in WinMail can't deal with size of Restricted Sites lists that Spybot and other security programs now use.

Fortunately you can disable the Vista WinMail Mime Sniffing feature.
For the techie you can edit the registry thus:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_MIME_SNIFFING]
"winmail.exe"=dword:00000001

That mod is also available for download here:
http://www.stargateuk.info/upload/winmail.reg

You need to merge the WinMail.reg fix into registry and reboot.

You may be able to Run the fix just by clicking on the link above - or you can save it to your computer and then double click it from there. You will get security warnings from Vista that you are trying to modify the registry - this is normal.

[bitman]

While WinMail may look like the Outlook Express we all came to trust - it is in fact a complete rewrite done specially for Vista and unfortunately it has many bugs and is prone to problems with its data files. MS have apparently now given up fixing WinMail and now just recommend swapping to LiveMail if you have problems.


Hey Doug,

That's a fairly accurate guess. The actual situation is that the Windows development group added WinMail to Vista, just like they used to include Outlook Express, but really had no intent to provide any real support.

The Windows Live Mail is part of the Windows Live (http://get.live.com/) services which also include Hotmail, Messenger, SkyDrive, Spaces and others. These are a quickly evolving set of products designed for mobility and connectivity via the Internet.

These are the future direction of Microsoft products on the Web, so the static clients included in Windows are basically dead. Of course the Windows Live products will always support current versions of Windows, but I wouldn't be surprised to see them evolve to support other platforms if they become popular.

Bitman (Windows Live MVP)