Scenario: you are using Windows 7 and for email, Windows Live Mail, Microsoft’s free email application. You PC is getting old though, so you buy a new PC running Windows 10, and want to transfer your email account, contacts and old messages to the new PC.

Operating systems generally come with a built-in mail client, and Windows Live Mail is in effect the official free email client for Windows 7. It was first released in 2007, replacing Windows Mail which was released with Vista in 2006. This replaced Outlook Express, and that evolved from Microsoft Mail and News, which was bundled with Internet Explorer 3 in 1996. Although the underlying code has changed over the years, the user interface of all these products has a family resemblance. It is not perfect, but quite usable.

Windows 8 introduced a new built-in email client called Mail. Unlike Windows Live Mail, this is a “Modern” app with a chunky touch-friendly user interface. Microsoft declared it the successor to Windows Live Mail. However it lacks any import or export facility.

The Mail app in Windows 10 is (by the looks of it) evolved from the Windows 8 app. It is more intuitive for new users because it no longer relies on a “Charms bar” to modify accounts or other settings. It still has no import or export feature.

The Mail app is also not very good. I use it regularly now myself, because there is an account I use which works in Mail but not in Outlook. I don’t like it. It is hard to articulate exactly what is wrong with it, but it is not a pleasure to use. One of the annoyances, for example, is that the folders I want to see are always buried under a More button. More fundamentally, it is a UWP (Universal Windows Platform) app and doesn’t quite integrate with the Windows desktop as it should. For example, pasting text from the clipboard is hilariously slow and flashes up a “Pasting” message in an attempt to disguise this fact. Sometimes it behaves oddly, an open message closes unexpectedly. It is like the UWP Calculator app, another pet hate of mine – I press the Calculator key on my Windows keyboard, up comes the Calculator, then I type a number and it doesn’t work, I have to click on it with the mouse before it accepts input. Just not quite right.

I am getting a little-off topic. Back to my scenario: how are you meant to transition from Windows Live Mail, the official mail client for Windows 7, to the Mail app in Windows 10, if there is no import feature?

In one way I can explain this. First, Microsoft does not really care about the Mail app. Everyone at Microsoft uses Outlook for email, which is a desktop application. This is important, because it means there is no internal pressure to make the Mail app better.

Second, Microsoft figures that most people now have a cloud-centric approach to email. Your email archive is in the cloud, so why worry about old emails in your Mail client?

This isn’t always the case though. A contact of mine has just been through this exact scenario. He has happily used Windows Live Mail (and before that Outlook Express) for many years. He has an archive of old messages which are valuable to him, and they are only in Windows Live Mail.

Unfortunately Microsoft does not currently have any solution for this. The answer used to be that Windows Live Mail actually works fine on Windows 10, so you can just install it. However Microsoft has declared Windows Live Essentials, of which Live Mail is a component, out of support and it is no longer available for download.

Incidentally I am writing this post in Windows Live Writer, another component of Essentials, but which fortunately has been published as open source.

If you can find the Windows Live installation files though, it still runs fine on Windows 10. You do need the full setup, called wlsetup-all.exe, rather than the web version which downloads components on demand. Here it is, installed and connected on Windows 10:

This application is no longer being maintained though, and there are some compatibility issues with some email services. This will get worse. The better answer then is to migrate to full Outlook. However, Microsoft makes Outlook expensive for home users, presumably to protect its business sales. Office Home and Student does not include Outlook, and to buy it separately costs more, currently £109 in the UK. Another option is to subscribe to Office 365 and pay a monthly fee.

Even if you intend to migrate to Outlook eventually, it may make sense to use Live Mail for a while on Windows 10. There is an export option to “Exchange” format which means you can migrate messages from Live Mail to Outlook.

This is all more work than it should be, for what must be a common scenario. You would think that migrating from the official mail client for Windows 7, to the official mail client for Windows 10, would not be so difficult.