Today it is April 23, almost two full months after the mail issue appeared. It looks like Live.com is dead, no updates, broken features, no news, ...

Live.com is a great concept and the first time I actually used a start page when surfing the internet. I use the site every day, but if there is no evolution of the site in the near future, I will have to go to competitors who are evolving their sites.

So, what's the deal with "This website wants to run the following add-on: 'MSXML 3.0 SP 7' from 'Microsoft Corporation'. If you trust the website and the add-on and want to allow it to run, click here..."?? Why the addon? And for the love of breadloaf, please post something about the mail issue - even a simple one liner, like "We're still working on the problem" would be nice; along with a unicode support for the usernames (in the upper right corner; my þ, æ and ð doesn't show properly!), and ability to customize the favorites gadget.

 

Why I'm on the subject of gadgets; why not let us have as many email accounts in the Mail gadget as we wish?

Btw, what's the deal with the "try the classic version" pushiness in Live mail now?  It's as though the user is being encouraged to switch back to the old (yawn) MSN layout.  Even the sign-in page has switched back to the old MSN login instead of the Live login.

Thanks for the quick and thorough reply Mike. I appreciate all of the team's hard work.

Hi Ed,
We've temporarily pulled it from the directory/default collections to prevent people from thinking they could add it, only to be disappointed when it still wasn't working. If you'd like to add it back (to watch for when it starts working again), you can do so with this link: http://www.live.com/?add=http://www.live.com/gadgets/mail/mail.xml 

I still can't offer a solid date for its return, but we continue to actively work on this. I miss it working as much as anyone else does :) As OEIL DE MOSCOU noted below, the mail checking functionality is starting to return to various properties (such as messenger's Windows Live Today), so, please take that as an indication that we're moving in the right direction.

Sorry I don't have better news yet. The entire team understands the frustration about this issue.

Hey Mike - any word yet on a fix for this? My Live.com page's Mail gadget still doesn't work. I tried deleting it and re-adding it, but I found that deleting it also deleted it from My Stuff. I tried to find it online, in particular at Windows Live Gallery, but it is nowhere to be found. As a result, I can see no way to re-add the (admittedly non-functional) Mail gadget to my page. Do you have any news on if/when we can expect this gadget to be fixed and accessible online? Thanks.

Hello , it run now on the "MSN today" popup  in MESSENGER  ver: 8.1  , in FRANCE  !

Good job !

what is the problem with firefox?

I'm also unable to access my Spaces site - on my Firefox browser!! Never had this problem until a few days ago (my page is just completely blank and white, and in the browser's top it just says "Mozilla Firefox"), I hope the entire Live team isn't trying to force people to use Internet Explorer. Luckily I'm still able to access Live.com through Firefox, but I wonder how long that will last.

 

Seems to me that there are more and more getting fed up with Live (such as in the comments here: http://liveside.net/blogs/main/archive/2007/03/16/microsoft-we-re-in-it-to-win.aspx#comments), and while I'm still sticking by Live.com it's getting more and more annoying by the day - especially since updates on how "repairs" are going (seems to me that Live.com is still in it's beta stage *sigh*) aren't any!!!

Hello there!
 
   I'm unable to access my spaces (http://johnysmith.spaces.live.com). I'm experiencing accessdenied problem. Would i highly appreciate if you can sort out this problem ASAP. Kindly do the needful
 
My Name: Johnson
blog: http://johnysmith.spaces.live.com
Email ID: Johnson_Smith21@hotmail.com
 
Thanks in advance.
 
Thanks,
Johnson

Hi Mike

 

Sorry to see you getting so much flack over this... but time is passing with no apparent progress on this issue. I am still hanging in there at present but as you can see others are not and that is without the silent majority who vote silently with their feet rather than trouble to comment and get shouted down by people like our anonymous friend earlier.

 

I dont blame the developers for the problem. So maybe you could pass something on to the Live Brand manager for me as follows:

 

The concept of branding is to imply a uniformity of product and to reassure people that different components of a brand will work well together. The down side is that everything within a Brand stands or falls on the reputation of the Brand as a whole.

 

In allowing one Live component (Live Mail) to be updated without testing to ensure that the other Live Component (Live.com) would work OK with it, you have damaged the Brand Identity. During Beta testing this damage is acceptable, but now the Brand is Live the damage is lasting in the minds of your customers.

 

All changes to systems carry an inherent risk, and sometimes things go wrong and the blame falls on the wrong people(as probably in this case). However as Brand Managers you need to minimise this risk and the associated blame game.

 

I would urge you in future to adopt a slightly different policy for releasing new changes within the Live Brand.

 

Firstly you should test integration across the Brand for any new changes and if any team is not happy with the effect on their component of the brand they should be able to veto release and you should hold release until the matter is resolved.

 

Secondly if a change happens and it breaks any part of the brand the change should be rolled back out until the matter is resolved and reapproved by the various teams.

 

This makes progress slower but quality higher.

 

If you adopt this (quite normal) principal you will avoid most of the criticism that you find coming your way at present.

 

Of course thats only my opinion and I dont know the time, staffing and budgetconstraints that you are working under. But please consider the alternative which is a dicredited Brand and the competion taking away your customers. 

 

For now Mike (and team) all you can do is keep working on a fix and I wish you good luck in your endeavours

Guys,

 

You just lost me, I signed up to gmail yesterday. I just do not believe the MS is interested in this service, it is free after all.

live.com just lost me to netvibes.com ... I am a MS-oriented developer and as many others would agree, there is always a reasonable limit of waiting time for a bug to be fixed... 3 weeks is just way over my patience's limit.

If the mail gadget was working, it was unfortunately just temporary. I promise a blog post as fast as I can once we have it working again.

 

Bob - Your comments were recieved in the spirit they were intended. The timing of the mail gadget issues is frankly just unlucky, as it was completely unrelated to our release. There are very few (if any) tradeoffs that would have been made to tweak a UI element instead of providing a functional mail gadget in a Live.com release.  Nobody is more concerned about getting the gadget working again as we are, and we have some very smart people working on it... it's just taking time. Rest assured that we're actively working on a real solution that will be fast, reliable, and secure. As far as the calendar gadget, that one was created by an external developer - you may want to send your feedback to the developer(s) if there are changes you'd like to see. I/the team appreciate your nice words.

‹-cJr-› - Thank you for the kind words as well

I look forward to shipping more new features and fixes that should please both of you :-)