People running Windows Essentials 2012 on Windows 10 received an email from the Outlook team yesterday informing them of an update for the bundled Windows Live Mail 2012 application required to continue sending and receiving emails on Windows 10. However, the update ended up crashing Mail 2012 for a lot of people.

Windows Live Essentials 2012

Here’s a look at what happened and why you might be better off moving on to modern and supported apps if you’re using Windows 10.

Windows Live Mail 2012 Need to Update for Windows 10

According to the email Microsoft sent Live Mail users, the Outlook team said the following: The email also noted that older versions of the Windows Live Essentials suite would no longer be supported, and users will need to upgrade to Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 to continue receiving emails: In a few weeks, we will be making some changes to our email services that might impact your @outlook.com, @hotmail, @live or @msn email account. These changes will prevent your email from being delivered to the Windows Live Mail 2012 application that you use. In order to continue using Windows Live Mail 2012 to send and receive email for your account, you need to install the latest update published here. If you use Windows Live Mail 2012 on Windows 8, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, we recommend that you switch to the built-in Mail app in Windows to stay connected and get the latest feature updates on Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.

Update: The Update Kills Live Mail

A few days after releasing the update for Window Live Mail 2012 (KB3093594), Microsoft received feedback that it was causing many issues and killing the Mail app. We also recommend all Windows Live Mail users on Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 to upgrade to Windows 10 and use the built-in Mail application to stay connected and get the latest feature updates. We suggest saving this email so you can refer to it later. Thank you for your understanding and continued use. Yours sincerely, The Outlook team Microsoft’s advice at this point is not to install the update, and if you have, uninstall it. It’s also recommending that users switch to the Mail app included in Windows 10 or 8.1 if you’re still on that.

Work Arounds

There are also a couple of other workarounds you might want to try. Apparently, the issue is being caused by calendar synchronization, and if you disable calendar sync, Live Mail 2012 will work without issues. Another option reported to work is to run Live Mail 2012 in Compatibility mode for Windows 8. We’ll continue to keep following this, and if you want to keep up with the news, we suggest following this Microsoft Community Thread. Microsoft launched its Windows Live Wave of services in 2005, building and services extension to the Windows desktop. The Windows Live Essentials suite was developed to complement those services and were largely a competitor to Apple’s iLife suite. The suite includes Windows Live MovieMaker, Writer, PhotoGallery, Mail, OneDrive, and Skype. Many of these built-in apps are no longer developed, except for OneDrive and Skype, built into Windows 10. However, windows, windows Live Writer recently got a new lease on life from a group of volunteers working on Open Live Writer. But in the end, if you’re still using these legacy services and plan on upgrading to Windows 10, your best option is to migrate to the built-in apps or find new supported programs. It then synced both Mail and Calendar successfully, but was missing some folders. I removed the email account and added it again, and it now works as it did before this debacle. If I didn’t know better, it’s as if MS are pushing us towards their still-in-beta-as-far-as-I’m-concerned Win !0 mail app…. It should default to port 993. Outgoing, smtp-mail.outlook.com, port 587. The only way I could set this was by selecting manual server setup somewhere in the process of creating a new email account. This was a critical item for me. I believe there is another protocol other than IMAP that also works for outlook, but can’t find it right now. That might even be better than IMAP. Of course, after going through this and getting Live Mail 2012 back in operation, I now have to wait for thousands of old emails I had kept to download back into my inbox, sent folder, and drafts. And, for this, my processor is being overworked and the fan is howling. This whole thing just infuriates me, it has to be totally unnecessary and a pure function of Microsoft disregard and incompetence. Wish I could sue them for my time and damage to my personal property. Mike I have just enough experience to be dangerous, apparently, because I have no idea how to fix this nor how to fix it without causing more damage to my computer. A friend suggested that you get what you pay for and perhaps the upgrade Win 10 is a smaller version of the version for sale. Possible? My question … is there an easy way to convert my Windows Live “Contacts” and “E-mail Folders” to make them compatible with the Windows 10 versions of contacts and folders. Thanks Here is the server that works for my old hotmail account: imap-mail.outlook.com The port is 993. The outgoing server is: smtp-mail.outlook.com port 587 Along with the live mail problems, I also upgraded my 5 year old Toshiba Satellite with Windows 10 in December. That caused several irritating problems, one of which I just managed to straighten out a few days ago. The upgrade deleted my printer drivers, which took my time to reinstall. My scanner driver was trashed, I had to reinstall that. Worst of all, my speaker and headphone drivers were replaced by a generic windows driver, which did not work. Every time I booted up, I had to run the audio troubleshooter to get my speakers to work. Every time. The headphones would not work when plugged in unless I went to the speakers icon and deliberately selected them as default output. Then, the speakers wouldn’t work when I unplugged the headphones, unless I went back and manually reset them as default. Incredible. Finally, the other day, I found the original 2010 audio drivers on the Toshiba web site, installed them, rebooted a couple times, and now speakers and headphones work as intended. Microsoft is a miserable, worthless company with zero regard for consumers. Mike When it comes to M$ Support you are pretty much on your own anyway so who cares if the previous versions are supported or not. I am running Win 7 on all my machines (18 unit) because I feel it is stable, whereas 8 and 10 are still battling through beta testing (in my opinion). I do not want to upgrade my machines to 10 or to use the M$ Mail App. Just asking cause I cant find the answer anywhere. Brad It does however work with IMAP set up for Hotmail accounts (it just wont sync calendars). The only problem is that WLM is a crap program when running IMAP. Messages keep getting sent to the wrong folders, read messages change to unread messages again, its just a mess. Time to look for a new Email Client me thinks. If you can get your WLM 12 to open and right click on the name of the parent mail folder (msn.com for me) left centre screen area, then properties, you can substitute the delta synch server address with the internet browser connection https://blu178.mail.live.com/default.aspx and all works fine as before. You can mark up the Calendar, just missing that ‘late to meeting’ reminder function. You may have to log in with your MS user name and password, but for me the Norton Vault auto writes this and I never get asked or a cookie is left behind on the PC, regardless it just works. Comment

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