New default apps are part and parcel of major new Windows releases. Long gone is Outlook Express, and the new Windows 10 Mail client is here to fill its role, now with touch support and a new minimalist, flat design. It's also a big advance over the Windows 8.1 Mail app, which I've nevertheless used with satisfaction. Here I'll take a closer look at the new mail client app's capabilities to find out whether it's worthy of being your default mail client.
Windows 8 featured a very basic modern app for mail, which was improved in 8.1 with things like drag-and-drop for moving mail among folders. This new Windows 10 Mail app, which comes preinstalled along with Calendar, is actually part of the free version of Microsoft's Office Mobile productivity suite. It's called Outlook Mail on Windows 10 Mobile running on smartphones and phablets, but just plain Mail on Windows 10 for PCs. It's one more reason, along with the other touch-friendly Office apps that will be free at the Windows Store, to make the free upgrade to Windows 10.
Setting Up Mail in Windows 10
If you've already set up the default Windows Mail app on a Windows 8.x PC, you're done as soon as you link the PC with your Windows account. I've found this one of the coolest things about modern Windows: settings syncing includes full email credentials. This is not something you can even say for Apple's ecosystem. If I sign into my Apple account on a Mac and then on an iPhone, I still have to set up my mail accounts separately on each device. Not so with Windows 10: Everything just works.
If you do need to set up your mail account for the first time, the Mail client supports all the standard mail systems, including (of course) Outlook.com, Exchange, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, iCloud, and any POP or IMAP account you may have. (POP isn't a choice with Windows 8.1's Mail client, which requires the superior IMAP.) Simply enter your address and password for any of the account types, and Mail will figure out the required server settings. A big advantage of using the Mail client instead of just the Web browser version of your email is that new messages will appear in the Action Center's notifications pane, from which you can reply.
Interface
As I mentioned, Mail's interface is spare and clear, mostly getting out of the way so you can concentrate on your email's contents. The Inbox view shows a left rail of buttons that you can expand with the three-bar "hamburger" icon. At the top are three simply designed buttons, a Plus sign for starting a new email, a head-and-shoulders icon to switch among multiple accounts, and a folders button. At the bottom are four more buttons, for Mail, Calendar, Feedback, and Settings. The Mail button seems superfluous, since you're already in mail, but perhaps it's for consistency with the Calendar app interface.When you have no email open, you'll see a cloud image in the right panel where mail contents normally show up; you can change this to any image of your choice.
Swipe actions are a new treat for Windows Mail users. These will be familiar from smartphone mail clients. Swiping on mail entry from left to right flags it, and from right to left archives it—useful for touch screen users. For keyboard and mouse users, you have hover-over quick action buttons for both those actions plus deletion. In both modes, a multiple-selection button lets you check boxes in each mail to Archive, Delete, or move them with drag-and-drop to a folder. You can change the swipe actions to other actions, such as marking as read or deleting the mail.
Mail's Conversation view is easy to use. There's a triangular pointer next to entries with multiple messages; just tap this to expand the conversation. For my money, this view is infinitely clearer than Gmail's byzantine conversation view, with all those collapsed messages and different reply boxes, and sometime no reply option showing.
Even in Tablet mode, I found interface buttons a bit small, though I was able to tap the ones I wanted on a Microsoft Surface Pro 3.
Composing Emails
When you tap the big Plus sign, you see a very simple mail-composing pane. Typing in the address box drops down an autocomplete list of contacts starting with the letters you type, with the most frequently emailed contacts appearing at the top. As you enter message text, the Format options let you apply bold, italics, and underling styles, and a dropdown box lets you go even deeper into formatting, letting you change font, size, color, and highlighting. You can even use strikeout or subscript and superscript.A separate Paragraph button drops down choices for bullets and numbering, indentation, alignment, and line spacing. In a word, you have free rein to style your message to taste.
The Insert tab offers four clear buttons for adding files, tables, pictures, and links to your email body. Each is sort of a subset of the menus in the free Word app that's available in the app store. For example, when you insert a picture, you can resize and reposition it, and even crop and rotate. Table options include auto-fitting contents, text rotation, color patterns, and header row options, but you can't sort columns. You can designate an email as of high importance (with a red exclamation point) or low importance (with a green down arrow). And finally, you can spell-check your work.