Get the Down to Business at Home with Windows Live Mail

A huge percentage of the office workers around the world spend their day (and nights) sitting in front of MS Outlook - the Inbox is the main channel of business communications in a vast array of businesses. A lot of the same people keep a web based personal email account that functions a lot less well than Outlook. If you're one of these people and you're running Windows 7 or later search your programs list for Windows Live Mail. When you open this program, if you've been using a Hotmail account it should be automatically detected. If not, you can sign in. (Note that you can set up a free @outlook.com email account as well.) The program gives you both the same convenience and business look of MS Outlook. Emails can be encrypted, sent with high importance, foldered, sorted, flagged and searched all in the same familiar ways that are possible in Outlook. The calendar and contacts operate the same way as in Outlook - with a few features missing.

Doubtlessly, many professionals, whether or working for themselves or on personal accounts at home make use of Windows Live Mail. Collecting business related emails sent from personal email accounts is an important part of electronic discovery. While Windows Live Mail functions a lot like Outlook, notice that the default email format is '.eml' - not '.msg' as in Outlook. When performing data collection, be sure to look for email messages in this format. Whether the saving individual emails, or exporting groups of emails en masse .eml will be the format that is used - Windows LIve Mail will save a different .eml file for each message.

If for some reason you cannot open .eml with Windows Live Mail, or Outlook, try changing the extension to .mht and opening the file in Internet Explorer. Some of the formatting will be lost, along with the attachments, but you will be able to read the message.