Windows 10 Mail: Elegant but Riddled with Little Problems

As Windows 10 is being refined and scrubbed down in an effort to clean out the usual post-release flaws that often plague new operating systems, the same is being done to Windows 10’s Mail application.

What at first looks like a very usable improvement over the Mail app that was built into Windows 8 and refined further in Windows 8.1 turns out to be a version of Mail that’s still riddled with some usability gaps.

In fact, Mail for Windows 10 even lacks a few features that made the Mail version of Windows 8.1 useful.

The basic layout of the new version of Mail looks mostly the same as its Windows 8.1 cousin, but comes with more visible options that were hidden away behind gesture. This seems to be part of an effort to turn key parts of the newest Windows version back into more classically desktop-friendly elements.

Perhaps the single most useful change in this direction towards classic desktop functionality is the ability to resize Mail in Windows 10 to any size desired on the screen. This single feature makes the latest version of Mail much more usable than its Windows 8 predecessors, which could only be fitted to full screen or split screen modes.

However as mentioned above, Mail 10 is not without its numerous post-release flaws. To wit:

• Conversation view, which some users might find annoying, can no longer be switched off for email.
• Shift-clicking to select a range of messages for deletion or for other actions is no longer possible. Neither is using CTRL+A to select all messages. Only Control-clicking messages one at a time is possible for selecting multiple messages. This is flat out annoying.
• Windows Mail 8.1 showed all of a user’s accounts on the left side of the screen, allowing a user to switch between accounts with a single click. This isn’t possible in Mail 10.
• While Mail for Windows 10 can now be resized like any ordinary folder window, everything is still confined to that single window. No opening of emails in separate windows is enabled.
• Viewing contacts in a left-hand pane menu was possible in Windows Mail 8.1. It can no longer be done in Mail 10. You can now only find people you want to email through the search and auto-complete function in the “TO” field in a new message.

We can only hope these UI/UX issues will be fixed as the Redmond, WA team gathers feedback from Win10 Mail users.