Windows Live Mail is dead to me

Why, oh why did I let myself get tempted? I researched and read to find out if it supports two-way synchronisation between my Hotmail account and and Windows Live Mail, and the answer was yes. Great! Thinks I. I will be able to have quicker access and better formatting to my hotmail account - it's all a bit dodgy using the web browser. And also: no ads with a Desktop App! Yay!

So I install and launch. Lo and behold it has retrieved all my contacts from Outlook Express which I didn't want. Well, I'll just delete my mail account in Live Mail (to be safe) and then delete them all. What does it do? Deletes all the mails it retrieved from Outlook Express and deletes all my Contacts. From my Hotmail account, too. You'd think that removing my mail account would stop that, but noooooooooo. So I quickly kill my Outlook and Plaxo services in Task Manager and log into Plaxo to remove my synchronisation with Hotmail, so my good contact data doesn't get infected with this crap. Though this is not a good state of affairs - I like having everything synchronised...

So then I set up my Hotmail account as an email account again in Windows Live Mail and import all my Outlook contacts. But hey, this is a version 1.0 of an MS product, so of course the data doesn't bring across the data properly - the fields don't correspond with fields from Outlook - work and home emails are swapped around, for one. One effect of which is that all my Messenger contacts are once again lost. I have no friends in Messenger. Hmmmm....could assist in getting work done.... But again, not how I want it.

And now....I'm afraid to reconnect my Plaxo to my Hotmail contacts because what if they stuff up my Outlook data? Woe is me...

So let's see: I'll delete all my contacts in Live Mail and see how it goes updating from Plaxo...not that I can actually delete them such that they're deleted...

OK. Time to give up and uninstall the mongrel. Outlook it is. But maybe on some other day when I have patience with MS again.

ETA: Or not! Seems that using Outlook would require the installation of an "Outlook Connector" and this will synchronise my contacts as well - after seeing how badly that was handled by Live Mail, I won't touch it with a barge pole. Will just have to stick with the web-interface.