How To Stop Windows Live Mail From Logging Into Windows Live

The Windows Live Mail email client is good, make no mistake. As a free offering you can’t do much better. It’s better than Outlook Express because it has a built-in calendar, better contact list sorting, etc. And once you use WL Mail you’ll soon realize it’s almost identical to the way Outlook Express 6 was with good extra added features.

Why can’t you run Outlook Express 6 in Windows Vista or 7?

It wasn’t easy getting this answer, however I did find out exactly why you cannot run that software in Windows versions above XP.

OE6 uses Internet Explorer 6 as its rendering engine by default. Whenever you use OE6, all emails are displayed internally to the software using that browser technology. And even if you use IE7 or IE8 in XP, OE6 will still "go backwards" and use IE6 to display mail.

Windows Vista and 7 do not come bundled with IE6. You get IE7 by default with Vista and IE8 (unless a UK version) with Windows 7. Regardless of whether you use Vista or 7, neither can run OE6 because there is no IE6 present.

Being that OE6 is tethered to IE6, so to speak, and that OE6 does not come bundled with Vista or 7, that is the reason why you cannot run OE6 in Vista or 7. It’s simply not possible.

WL Mail for all intents and purposes is a "standalone" version of OE6. Different look, new features, but operates almost identically to the way OE6 did.

Turning off all Windows Live services in Windows Live Mail

WL Mail while very good tries to beat you over the head into connecting/synchronizing everything with a Windows Live ID, such as a Hotmail account.

What happens is that it’s easy to enable, but a pain to disable.

Once you know where to disable this, it’s easy to get rid of.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Don’t perform these steps until you read Additional Notes at the bottom of this article.

Step 1. Show your menu bar.

Like this:

This is at the top right of the WL Mail client. This will enable the top menu bar so you can quickly access functions.

Step 2. Click Tools, then Options.

Step 3. Click the Connection tab, then the Stop Signing In button at bottom.

You will get this notice (I used an old Hotmail account I never use for sake of example):

Click the Stop signing in button here.

Additional notes

If you’ve been using WL Mail for a while with the Windows Live integration turned on, you probably have contacts and maybe some calendar entries loaded in.

Those entries are stored via your Windows Live account and not locally.

When you turn off Windows Live integration, your contacts and calendar entries may disappear. They didn’t. They’re stored via your Hotmail account. You may have to re-enter all your contact and calendar entries manually.

I have not (as of yet) found a way to manually copy over the information from a Windows Live ID to a local account – but I’m working on it.

Does this mean with Windows Live integration turned off that everything will be stored local to your PC and not the internet? Concerning contacts and calendar, yes. Concerning non-Hotmail accounts, it depends how you have the mail set up. POP will obviously be local, IMAP obviously will not be.

What is the advantage to running WL Mail with Windows Live integration turned off?

The advantage is that if you want WL Mail to run as close to the way OE6 did, the best way to do that is to turn off all Windows Live services in the client. The "Sync" button at that point acts exactly the way "Send/Receive" did in OE6, as does everything else.

You will notice that the client speeds up significantly when it’s not syncing with Microsoft servers. Startup is significantly quicker because it’s not logging into Windows Live. General usage and shutdown are also quicker.

Considering that WL Mail is already fast to begin with, for most of you it will run as fast as lightning with the Live integration disabled – the same way OE6 did.