Outlook Express - History

History

Microsoft Internet Mail and News was a freeware email and news client and ancestor of Outlook Express. Version 1.0 was released in 1996 following the Internet Explorer 3 release. This add-on precedes the Internet Mail profile for Microsoft Exchange 4.0 bundled in Windows 95. Version 2.0 was released at the end of 1996. In 1997 the program was changed and renamed as Outlook Express and bundled with Internet Explorer 4. The executable file for Outlook Express, msimn.exe, is a holdover from the Internet Mail and News era. Internet Mail and News handled only plain text and rich text (RTF) email, lacking HTML email.

At one point, in a later beta version of Outlook Express 5, Outlook Express contained a sophisticated and adaptive spam filtering system; however this feature was removed shortly before launch. It was speculated on various websites and newsgroups at that time, that the feature was not stable enough for the mass market. Nearly two years later, a similar system, using a similar method of adaptive filtering, appeared as a feature of Microsoft Office Outlook.

Internet Explorer 5 required Outlook Express 5 to save Web Archive files (see MHTML).

Outlook Express 6 SP3 is the latest version which is part of Windows XP SP3. Extended support for Windows XP SP3, which covers security hotfixes, will end in 2014.

In October 2005, Microsoft announced that Windows Vista would exclusively include a new application named Windows Mail, based on large parts of Outlook Express source code. Microsoft was also concurrently developing Windows Live Mail Desktop (later renamed to Windows Live Mail), a mail client for its Hotmail service. Windows Live Mail was released in November 2007. In the future, support for Outlook Express and Windows Mail will be discontinued in favor of Windows Live Mail.

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